


Whosoever's Is The Storm

by theprophetlemonade



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: (a lot of codependency basically but that's the Drift for you), (can I ever write a fic where Ymir doesn't shove herself into the limelight), (no), Alternate Universe - Mecha, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Drift Compatibility, Drift Side Effects, Extended One-Shot, Gen, Ghost Drifting, Gift Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Smut, Intense Connections, JM Secret Santa 2016, JM!exchange challenge, Jaeger Pilots, Jaegers (Pacific Rim), JeanMarco Gift Exchange, Kaiju, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mecha, Mentions of Chronic Sickness, Mentions of Death, Pacific Rim AU, Pre-Canon, Robots, Science Fiction, The Drift (Pacific Rim), Third Person POV, Unhealthy Dynamics, emotional disturbance, pacrim au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 06:21:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 57,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8962363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprophetlemonade/pseuds/theprophetlemonade
Summary: Jean Kirschtein is a Jaeger pilot, just trying his damnedest not to meet a disappointing end. Maybe he had goals once. Maybe there was a part of him that the storm didn’t touch. Not anymore. Having been kicked from the Mark II Jaeger, Atlas Rogue, on account of the fact no-one Drifts with Eren Jaeger and walks out unscathed, Jean finds himself relegated to the Anchorage Shatterdome, Alaska, the very edge of the world. There's a new Mark IV about to be launched, and it needs a pilot. Technically - it needs two pilots. It's a shame he has a chip on his shoulder the size of a Kaiju. A JMGE PacRim AU for Yoitay, exploring the journey of a Jaeger pilot from the bottom of the barrel, to the cusp of hope, across every up and down in between.





	1. (this is our) extinction event

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yoitay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yoitay/gifts).



> Hey guys! And Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to my JMGE recipient, Yoitay! They requested Pacific Rim!AU, which, you guys of course know WAS MADE FOR ME. I have literally been preparing to write a JM PacRim AU for two years, so when I saw this I KNEW IT WAS DESTINY. I already had a lot of research done, and because of that … this happened. I wrote over 50K words in 9 days. Tbh I don’t remember actually sleeping. 
> 
> But this fic is as much for you guys! I know PacRim AUs are popular within the JM fandom, and I know I’ve been MIA a lot this year, especially with Droplets and JM content. I hope this makes up for it! I didn’t go full-tilt on the angst, so I’ve totally redeemed myself, right? Right?! 
> 
> This fic is not horrendously lore-heavy, but it does require knowledge of the PacRim movie (not really the prequel comic) and I don’t explain much of the jargon, as that would affect the narrative flow. If you don’t know what the Drift is, or how Jaeger pilots interface, or about Kaiju, I suggest having a quick Wiki skim. This fic doesn’t explicitly take place in the movie universe, as I’ve fudged some dates a bit, and brought in the Cat IV slightly earlier than canon. I messed around with some of the tech too, but you won’t notice unless, like me, you’ve spent the last 22 days on the PacRim Wiki.
> 
> Haven't had time to proof this properly, so there's bound to be tons of typos - I'll get 'round to correcting them over the next few days.
> 
> Have a good holidays, and I’ll see you in 2017 with some Droplets!

_Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos ("whoever's is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell")._

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 5, 2018. 50KM DUE EAST OF SHANGHAI, EAST CHINA SEA.**

“Atlas! Atlas, you’re out of alignment!”

Jean Kirschtein’s heart plummets into his stomach. Every bone in his body screams in pain, each wave that smashes into the side of the Jaeger felt in his joints, in his blood, in his very marrow. There’s an iron taste in his mouth, hot and metallic. His head is spinning. He has no idea which way is up.

 _The Drift_ –

“Out of alignment. Code red,” blurts the AI, bright lights flashing strobe across the Conn-Pod. Sirens blare. He’s not sure if they’re from the HUD or from the shrieking Kaiju that reels away from the blast of the particle projector cannon, weeping viscous blue from a cauterised hole in its flank, furious.  

Jean staggers sideways, nausea surging up his throat, a burning heave. The Jaeger staggers with him, lunging forward in the water with a jerk, only to be thrown backwards again by another wave. No-one resists. No-one catches him –

“Atlas!” screams LOCCENT again, white-noise obliterating anything else that is said. Jean’s head pounds; his lungs squeeze. Breath comes hard and fast. 

“I’m stabilising! I’ve got this!” he yells, “I’m okay, just let me control it!”

“You’re fine, but Eren is way out!” LOCCENT snaps, “He’s too deep in the Drift – he’s chasing the RABIT!”

Jean’s head snaps around, and there’s Eren to his right, rigid, pulsating with fierce energy, eyes green and alight and raging with the storm of insidious hatred. He’s not moving, his lips a flurry over chanted words Jean cannot hear, but knows all too horrifically well. His gloved fists are balled tight around the PPC gauntlet, and the Jaeger shakes around them with the trembles of an earthquake.

“Weapons system engaged. Particle projector powering up,” squawks the AI.

Jean feels anger in his veins – and it’s not his, it never is, not this sort of blind fury, not this hate, and regret, and _grief_ –

“Fuck! Not again!” Jean grits between clenched teeth. He tries desperately to plug the PPC from his side, but Eren’s grip is too strong. The Jaeger wrenches in pain as the plasma clip is emptied into the tossing sea. Jean feels it ripple up his spine, paralysing. “Eren! Eren, _c’mon_!”

The Kaiju – Shrieker, Category III, a _monster_ – wheels around, its enormous tail driving through the waves in spurts of foam and hissing salt. It opens its jaws, carnivorous teeth sharp and blue and hungry, and it wails again – shrill and ear-splitting, and it rakes through Jean’s consciousness like a knife.

“He’s going deeper!” LOCCENT shouts, “Kirschtein, you’ve got to get him back or you’re gonna be a sitting duck! Wasp is still two-hundred metres out!”

“Eren!”

_I’m going to kill them all!_

_Eren, stop! It’s just a memory! Don’t engage!_

How many times has Jean seen Carla Jaeger die? How many times has he stood aside in blind panic as the Kaiju ploughs through the suburbs of Tokyo, tearing down houses, stomping over rooftops, crushing the humans who scatter like ants beneath its feet? How many times has he listened to Eren’s childhood screams as blood gushes a sickly, black river from the quivering lips of his mother?

How many times has the Drift collapsed on them because of it?

“Eren! Don’t chase the RABIT!”

The Drift rages with the colour red, igniting, scorching, searing across Jean’s circuitry suit and scarring him with lacerations of white-hot heat. Carla Jaeger’s screams entangle with the Kaiju shrieks, with the blaring alarms, with the hounding of LOCCENT in his ear. His voice wheezes, each desperate plea to his co-pilot dying in haggard breaths upon his lips.

Jean plants his feet, raises his fists – Atlas Rogue struggles to match him, a great heaving effort that Jean can feel yanking on each bundle of nerves wired into his pounding head – and it’s crucifying. The pain from the disconnect threatens to tear his head apart. The Kaiju roars, blasting through the waves a hurricane.

“Eren, God dammit!”

Corinthian Wasp spears through the tide like an arrow, lithe and agile and controlled, her lancer piercing through the skull of the Kaiju with a sickening crack and an explosion of Kaiju Blue across the clouded sky, a splatter of toxic vapour. The Kaiju wails, collapsing upon the lance, skewered and very much dead.

The Drift, in pieces, rages on.

It was always going to be this way.

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 15, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

Jean Kirschtein is a Jaeger pilot.

Twenty-two years old, born by the sea in Washington State, and his parents are still together. It starts an ordinary story.

He was seventeen when the first Kaiju emerged from the Breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and made land in San Francisco. By the time tanks and jets and missiles took it down six days and thirty-five miles later, three cities were destroyed and tens of thousands of lives were lost.

Sixth months later, his father packed up a suitcase of his possessions, gave his mother a quick kiss on the mouth, and left to join the Pan-Pacific Defense Corp, risen up out of the ruins of the old world – and on his eighteenth birthday, Jean enrolled in the PPDC too.

He went to Manila for the clean-up operation, got his hands dirty in the ashes, and decided he was destined for more. He listened to the chatter on the radios and the rumours on the streets: _you need monsters to fight monsters_. He watched from the safety of a canteen as Eden Spirit plunged a chain sword into the heart of a beast, and brought it to its knees in the bay of Hong Kong city, and the human race reinstated itself to: _there will be no apocalypse today_.

He joined the Jaeger programme the very next day. Tokyo became his home. The body of Atlas Rogue creaked in the hangar, a carcass shell, waiting for its pilots, believing in destiny.

Destiny was for fools.

* * *

 

Alaskan rain is harsh and miserable. It beats down upon the concrete of the landing strip an inconsolable and erratic drum beat, sloshing into puddles and squelching as sleet beneath Jean’s feet. His soaked clothes stick to him as a second skin, cold and feverish, and he wonders if he might ever be dry again. He hacks a glob of snot back up his nose, wiping the remnants on the back of his wet sleeve. The forelock of his hair is plastered to his forehead.

The Anchorage Shatterdome looms up above him as a grey and imposing giant, four-hundred feet of towering, rain-washed steel and iron. Saturated clouds cling mercilessly to the rooftop, billowing in tempestuous waves across the fine pin-pricks of light brave enough to pierce the veil of misery.

Jean prickles, swallowing the bitter taste in his mouth with a grimace. This place feels one part graveyard, and two parts a punishment. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t have been forced to transfer.

It was always Eren who brought chaos into the Drift. It was always Eren who made their neural handshake so tumultuous. It was always Eren who –

Jean sighs. There’s water in his boots now, seeping into his socks. It’s fucking freezing. He misses Tokyo, and all its bright lights, and hot summers, and clear skies. He misses the little things that allowed him to pretend he wasn’t marching towards the end of the world every time he suited up and stepped into the Conn-Pod of Atlas Rogue.

He doubts it’s a sight he’ll ever see again. Atlas Rogue is no longer his.

“Well I’ll be fucking damned!” comes a crow from out of the rain. “Is that Jean fucking Kirschtein, or just a drowned rat standing on my doorstep?!”

Jean looks up from his feet and meets the predatory gaze and wolfish smile of Ymir – pilot of the Johtun Apostle, the only Mark I Jaeger still in commission. She’s swamped in far more layers than he, her waxy leather jacket stamped with Johtun's logo and its motto – _Giants Will Fight Giants_  – deflecting the beads of rain that come beating down. She holds an umbrella in one hand, and the other rests casually in her pocket, matching the swagger of each stride she takes towards Jean.

He’s known her a while now. She’s been in the PPDC programme since the Glory Days, far longer than him, and they’ve ridden together, him in Atlas Rogue, and her in Johtun, on more than one drop. Maybe he’d call her a friend. Maybe he’d call her a thorn in his side. On a day like today, it feels like the latter is more appropriate.

“You guys couldn’t even afford to send the Marshal out here to greet me?” Jean complains crassly, stepping under the shelter of her umbrella and blinking out the water that clings to his lashes. “What sort of shit show are you running up here?”

“Nice to see you too,” she bites with a grin, nudging him with her hip, “I haven’t seen you since, what? Vladivostok, when we did that assist with Corinthian Wasp? I watched your Shanghai drop on TV though. That was a right fucking mess, man.”

Jean grumbles in acknowledgement, hunching his shoulders and scrunching his face into a frown, matching Ymir’s long strides as she turns back towards the hangar door and starts walking.

Thirteen drops, nine kills, and four misalignments in the heat of battle. Four scrapes with death too many.  Four _right fucking messes_. He doesn’t need to be reminded.

“Yeah, well,” Jean grunts, “That mess got me kicked from Atlas, so. Y’know. Sore spot.”

“They didn’t kick Eren?” Ymir remarks, surprise in her voice, “Daaaamn, son. He really is riding the PPDC dick. I thought he was the issue, not you?  He’s the one that always trips, right?”

“Right,” Jean replies, “But they found him a new Drift partner. Not me. Her name’s Mikasa, and – and I don’t know.”

“Maybe if you weren’t such a moody fuck –”

“Oh, leave it,” Jean gripes, as they step beneath the shutter door of the Shatterdome, Ymir retracting her umbrella and shaking it all over the floor.  “You don’t have to tell me how much fucking better it would be if I Drifted with her. I tried, y’know. Just to check. But she was all about Eren – they’re childhood friends or something, so of course their Drift was so much better than mine – common reference points or whatever, and –”

The stench of motor oil is instantly familiar. The drone of power tools, the creak of steel, the hum of electricity that pulses in the walls and beneath the floor – all of it settles heavily beneath Jean’s skin, along with the cold. Forklifts trundle past, hauling crates and spools of wire; J-Techs with tablets beneath their arms jog past, bags beneath their eyes purple and sleep-deprived; the sound of a blow torch and flying sparks splutters through the commotion. Yellow and green lights overhead flicker erratically.

“Sounds like you might be a teensy bit bitter,” Ymir scoffs.

“They’re always gonna care more about Atlas than its pilots,” Jean laments, pressing his lips into a fierce line. His frustration bubbles with the familiar tingle of Eren’s red-hot anger. It never surges to the forefront, but it’s there. It’s always been there, ever since their first Drift in the Conn-Pod, Hell – since their first fight in the Kwon Room at the Tokyo Shatterdome. It’s a part of him now. The fury, the recklessness, the headstrong drive –

“They couldn’t afford to have Atlas dropping out so often,” Jean continues. "Couldn't afford to keep losing the Drift."  _They just didn’t care what it was doing to the two of us._

Ymir slaps him on the back violently, and he chokes.

“Ow!”

“Sounds like you got the better deal to me, Jean,” she announces, indifferent. She nods to herself, self-congratulatory. “New Jaeger, new team, and you get to see _me_ –”

“You mean, being deported to the middle of fucking nowhere to freeze my ass off as I train up some greenie to pilot a Jaeger that hasn’t even been field tested, only to serve as Johtun’s bitch for the foreseeable future? Great. Sounds peachy. I’m so excited.”

“My spider senses tell me you’re being sarcastic.”

“What, really? I would _never_.”

That’s the regrettable truth of it. Mikasa Ackermann is the co-pilot Eren needs. She’s calm and collected and brings very little into the Drift. She’s like a sponge for all that anger, and that _storm_. Five practice Drifts, and Jean watched them all from the LOCCENT control room of the Tokyo Shatterdome, and not once did they slip. Not once did they lose alignment. Not once did Eren chase the RABIT. Not once –

A day later, and transfer orders were sitting on Jean’s bunk, and Alaska was his destination. The latest of the Mark IV Jaegers was looking for a pilot, and apparently those are few and far between these days, most resting at the bottom of the ocean, or in the belly of some slain beast washed up on a beach amidst of a pool of blue blood.

Maybe it’s for the best. That day in Shanghai, after Corinthian Wasp had arrived and slain Shrieker – Jean had slammed Eren into the wall of the Conn-Pod the moment they were disconnected, and plied him with a punch to the jaw and a knee to the gut. Eren had spat in his face. There had been blood on his first four knuckles. The LOCCENT officers had tried to pull them apart, but –

Maybe they moved him to stop him from killing Eren. It would be reasonable, from a strategic point of view. Atlas would still run, and someone with drop experience would be in the next Mark IV, backing up Johtun Apostle in her old age.

But Jean had not wanted to kill Eren. You don’t _want_ to kill someone you’ve been in the Drift with. You don’t want to kill the person you’ve shared the most intimate details with, the person who’s carried your pain and shouldered your anger, the person who’s been inside your head –

Jean had hit Eren, because he’d almost got them killed. Again. Both of them. The pain Eren feels, Jean feels too, even now. He wonders if PPDC forgets that sometimes.

 

* * *

 

The Alaskan Shatterdome is a different world to Jean’s last few days in Tokyo. There had been a sombre silence hanging like a guillotine over the heads of everyone after Corinthian Wasp dragged Atlas Rogue back to the shoreline, and it was announced that the piloting team was to be dissolved. A sense of defeat swung back and forth, a pendulum in Jean’s mind, matching the lethargic beat of his heart as he had packed up his life and avoided Eren’s glare, and Mikasa’s stony silence, and the withering stare of the Wasp pilots, Annie Leonhardt, and Hitch Dreyse.

There’s life in Alaska. Subdued – because what life on planet Earth isn’t, anymore? – but vibrant, in the dry laughter between friends, in the welcoming smiles, in the sense of hope that still lingers. Jean follows Ymir across the hangar floor like a lap dog, dragging his feet but trotting to keep up. She doesn’t smile at anyone, but she nods her head, and they duck theirs in return out of some sense of revere she has earned. People clear the path for her, dividing like the sea before Moses, the road she receives not a red carpet, but yellow-flush concrete, and Jean supposes it’s all they can ask for these days.

He and Eren straddled the line between heroes and pariahs in Tokyo. Atlas Rogue was the last of the Mark IIs, built for strength and speed and _hope_ – and so shouldered the burden of humanity because of it. Piloted by the son of the man who invented the Jaegers; it felt like the promise of a new generation, the promise of survival unto tomorrow. Jean had enjoyed the celebrity of it; enjoyed the superficiality of it. _Fight now, reap the rewards tomorrow._ He never had to think about what he was doing, nor why. Never had to think about anything more than surviving. Only about how to make it easy. Bearable.

He supposes that’s why he likes the Drift – in all its stutters and faults, and despite all that Eren ever brought to it. He likes the Drift, because it’s a distraction from the reality of waking up every day and facing the world anew. That’s what takes a real soldier. They all have their own ways of coping.

But in comparison to him and Eren, Ymir is a God. Johtun Apostle single-handedly protected the American Pacific coastline for four years before Helios Shrike came to Los Angeles. Nineteen drops, and nineteen kills. It’s a record only surpassed by Eden Spirit, the decommissioned Jaeger out of Hong Kong, who met a grisly death when one of its pilots was yanked from the Conn-Pod mid-drop, held between the Kaiju’s teeth, lost an arm, and yet lived to tell the tale.

Johtun Apostle is a scrapper – small and hard and fast, equipped with razor claws and crippling strike power, able to outmanoeuvre any Kaiju threat. She fights up-close and personal, her front line within pissing distance of the enemy. She sinks her teeth in for a mouth full of blood with each and every fight.

And yet she revels in none of it. Maybe there are drugs or alcohol or some other way she manages to last the days without spiralling into some Hellish grief – maybe that’s what Krista, her co-pilot, is for her. Ymir doesn’t bask in the glory and the fame. The swagger she has isn’t arrogance or pride. The nod of her head to the J-Techs they pass isn’t out of cold acknowledgement, but out of respect for her team.

She fights; she survives; she finds a way to live. Jean’s always going to be jealous of that last part.

“There she is,” Ymir says, dredging Jean from his thoughts. The glare of polished white-silver strikes him across the face as he looks up – Johtun Apostle in all her tremendous glory stands tall before him, her diamond-tipped claws sparkling at her sides. “My beast of burden. She doesn’t look a day over five, does she?”

“She looks like a beat-up old Ford Capri,” Jean remarks crassly. “What did you do, pilot her into a wall?”

“Piss off,” she says, “Like Atlas was any better. If Johtun’s a Capri, that pile of scrap was a Trabant.”

“Would've been a better excuse than the one they gave me,” Jean grumbles, pouting petulantly, hands stuck deep in his pockets. "Eren, you keep fucking up - so Jean, _you're fired_."

“You’re acting like a spoiled kid!” she laughs, “You’re getting a brand-spanking new Mark IV instead of that piece of unreliable _crap_ , and I’m still strapped to the chest of a nuclear reactor.”

“I’m surprised they haven’t switched you over to digital,” Jean remarks quietly, feeling guilty. “’Specially with your new co-pilot.”

“Been two years. She’s not new anymore. We’re getting married.”

Jean summons a soft smile. It’s genuine. Sparks of hope still crop up now and again, a dancing glimmer in the dark of the eye of the storm. He’s resolutely happy for them.

“She’s still the President’s daughter,” he chooses to reply, and Ymir shrugs. “I’m pissed because you’re the ones who should be getting this new Jaeger, not me.” _I should still be back in Atlas, where I belong._

Ymir steps forward, tucking her folded umbrella beneath her arm, and outstretching her fingers to touch the toe-caps of her Jaeger, her touch atomic in comparison. Her fingers trail upon the steel, almost wistfully.

Jean can’t help but fill the silence with more words: “You guys have been driving this thing for too long. You know the risks.”

Ymir glances back over her shoulder at him, her crooked grin slipping – just barely – into something more pensive. It lasts only seconds, the spark behind her eyes wavering for heartbeat, before returning with a force only to be described as baiting.

Ymir taps the base of her throat with two fingers, and smiles, sardonically.

“Bit too late,” she says, “The cancer's in my lungs already. I’m gonna have to let you take this one, Jean. Me and Johtun ride until we die. Maybe sooner than planned, but. Y’know how it is.”

“Rangers to the LOCCENT bridge. I repeat, all Rangers, please report to the LOCCENT bridge for briefing,” calls the PA system overheard, before Jean has the chance to stick his foot in it.

It’s not unusual – most of the Mark I pilots suffered greatly for the sake of wings. Most, at the bottom of the sea, water filling their lungs until they burst; others, dragged limbless from the Conn-Pods, a little bit of their soul fragmenting off in the carcass of the Jaeger. And others again – doomed to see the last moments of their life in a hospital bed, tubed up to a bypass machine, and not in a Jaeger.

It doesn’t make it easy to know what to say. _Oh, it sucks that you’re dying quicker than me_ doesn’t seem to get across the sentiment very well.

 _You might not be dying at all_ , Jean tells himself, looking at Ymir as she turns towards the PA loudspeaker, her words already brushed casually from her shoulders. _Maybe you’ve dodged the bullet. They pulled you out of Atlas at the very last moment._

But still. Tokyo was home. Eren was his partner. Atlas Rogue was his _machine_. He doesn’t welcome change. Maybe dying was a piece of the game plan: a concrete end he always knew was coming.

 _New game plan,_ he thinks. _Grab the first kid who can Drift, whip them into shape. Save Johtun’s ass a couple times. Get put back on solo drops. Show them what a mistake they made. Take no shit, give no blood. Easy._

 

* * *

 

“Jean!”

The bridge is busy as ever, J-techs running circles around clusters of tangled wires and flashing computer monitors, squawking loudly across comms and fingers rattling across keyboards – but Jean spots Krista Lenz in an instant, her smile white and angelic as ever, not a hair out of place.

“Krista, hey!” he says, “It’s been a while.”

“Gosh, I haven’t seen you since Vladivostok,” she says, dragging him down into a firm hug. She squeezes him like a grandmother who doesn’t know her own strength. “I’m so sorry about you being dragged all the way up here for our assist. I heard about Shanghai. I’m so sorry, Jean.”

He knows she doesn’t mean it – no-one is _really_ sorry. But it’s easier to accept condolences on a platter, and there’s always been something about Krista that makes the people around her believe that she means it. She’s a politician’s daughter, after all. It’s not a character flaw, and Jean doesn’t hold it against her, but –

But, no-one’s truly sorry to see a dysfunctional team pulled apart, not really. Not in this line of work.

“Ba~be,” Ymir croons from over Jean’s shoulder, nudging Jean out the way to sling her long arms around Krista’s neck and press a smooching kiss to her crown of blonde hair. “I missed you so much!”

“It’s literally been an hour, Ymir,” Krista frowns, trying to prize herself free, but failing spectacularly. “You know I’ve been helping out in the Kwoon with the new trainees. And you should be too, there’s no excuse for your slacking – I know you go to nap in the Conn Pod when you want to avoid work –”

“Rangers!” comes the booming voice of Marshal Erwin Smith, shocking Jean to attention. Krista straightens up beside him, and Ymir grumbles as she reluctantly disentangles herself, stuffing both of her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket with a slouch.

Marshal Smith carries himself with pride and respect, strides purposeful and posture proper, hands clasped behind his back. His blue eyes are piercing – but not in a way that makes Jean long to cower.

The subway posters and TV interviews do not do him justice. Jean has never met the man, but he remembers the days of Eden Spirit well. Marshal Smith and Fightmaster Levi Ackermann were the glory of humanity, and maybe they paid the price for that. The carcass of Eden Spirit lies in tatters in Oblivion Bay, her parts scavenged for other Jaegers or for black market collectors, and the right arm of Erwin Smith lies in just as many pieces somewhere at the bottom of Santa Monica Bay.

He became a Marshal for the PPDC shortly after, unwilling and unable to get back in the hot seat after the damage that was done to him in all the worst ways. Jean can see it in the cradle of his eyes. There’s a fire, but it’s blue. Dampened by the rain. A little bit old, a little bit weary.

Aren’t they all.

Marshal Smith looks Jean up and down, and maybe he sees the same thing reflected back: a little bit broken, but more than a little bit angry at the hand that has been dealt. He waits a moment before offering a hand.

“Mister Kirschtein,” he says formally, but there’s a lick of warmth in the recesses of his tone. “Welcome to Anchorage. I’m glad you could make it.”

“It’s not like I had much choice,” Jean remarks crassly. Erwin’s eyebrows both rise.

“You’re right,” he says, “A man in your position has no choice, and we need a pilot with experience. Unless you’d rather the Wall.”

“No, sir,” Jean rectifies, “I am grateful for the opportunity, sir. I’m excited to get back on the front line.”

“Right you are,” Marshal Smith says, his lips quirking at the corners.  “Well then. Let’s start with a tour, and then we will reconvene for briefing at 1700 hours. Ladies – I’ve had a word with the Fightmaster, and you’re both relieved from your duties for the remainder of the day. If you’d be so inclined to accompany us.”

Krista nods, and Ymir grumbles a string of obscenities, her expression souring in an instant. Jean misses Tokyo.

 

* * *

 

The Anchorage Shatterdome is a labyrinth, no feat of Japanese engineering or technology. Its corridors all looks the same, grey and concrete and lit with yellow-fluorescent lights that flicker and stutter in and out of arrest. The ceilings are low and Jean feels them bearing down upon his shoulders. It’s a little claustrophobic.

They pass a few J-Techs scurrying between the canteen and the hangar floor, and the Marshal receives a salute, Krista a smile, and Ymir one of those nods again – and Jean gets a _look_. It’s hard to decipher – some semblance of respect, other parts resentment. It polishes his ego just the same; has him puff his chest out in boastful pride.

And then he hears _Atlas Rogue_ in their hushed whispers, followed closely by _washed-up pilot_ , and his skin prickles. He grinds his teeth and his nose wrinkles with the smell of bad blood.

“It’s not as nice as Tokyo,” Jean finds himself muttering beneath his breath. The Marshal and Krista walk three steps ahead in hushed conversation, on an equal footing Jean would never even dream of.

“Talk to the guys who give us our budget,” Ymir snarks, “If the Americans cared as much as the Japanese about killing these fucks, the war might’ve ended before you even needed to get in a Jaeger.” She taps her throat again. “And before this.”

“You guys should do more TV spots,” Jean remarks, “Sell yourself out. Y’know Ellen does segments for ten grand? I heard FOX offers more, especially for pilots. Helios and Wasp have been hogging all the spots – they’re all shiny and new and cool, I guess – but we do them – we _used_ to do them with Atlas, y’know, just so the public could _connect_ –”

“How about I leave you with that whilst I go out and kill the monsters?” Ymir smarts, “When it’s in my job description to be a famewhore, maybe I’ll consider it. _Connect with the public_ , what the fuck next.”

“You’re an ass.”

“Now, that _is_ in my job description.”

They see the LOCCENT bridge, and the K-Lab, and the production room, but the Marshal is called away not long after – and Ymir takes it upon herself to deliver the rest of the tour as lacklustre as she can possibly manage.

They come to the Kwoon Room last, the doorway filled with a crowd of spectators, all clad in matching flight suits.

“Here,” Ymir says, leaning up against the wall and gesturing with a nod of her chin. There are two men in the centre of the room, poised in wide stances in the middle of a mat, bō raised in defence of their puffed-out chests. “New cadets. They’re all here for your co-pilot seat, believe it or not. I personally _don’t_ believe it, because if any of them actually _knew_ you–”

“What rotation are they?” Jean interrupts, bristling obtusely.

“Third,” Krista replies. “Top thirty, cut down from two-hundred or so applicants. The Marshal and the Fightmaster hand-selected them all.”

Jean glances over all the expectant faces watching the brawl with selfish interest; some of them are so young that he can’t help but wonder why they’re out of school. There’s too much exuberance, too much groundless determination, not enough wrinkles.

“They’re all green,” Jean sneers, “There’s only so much practice you can get out of hitting someone with a stick over and over again.”

One of the cadets swipes the legs out from beneath another trainee with his bō, and he goes clattering to the floor. The victor looks proud, a smirk plastered across his features as he turns to the crowd for approval – until the loser strikes out with his legs, slams his calves, and sends the victor to the ground with a groaning thump. There’s muffled laughter in Kwoon Room, a snort from Ymir, and a fierce glare from the Fightmaster – but Jean just rolls his eyes.

“Right. What I just said. These are really the best we’ve got going?” he laments, folding his arms as he shuffles out of the way of a group of J-Techs passing by in the corridor. “They’re all just desperate for the easy life. No real skill here. Just want to avoid the Wall.”

“I’m sure they’re doing their best,” Krista says, “We were all trainees once.”

“Don’t listen to him, babe,” Ymir sniggers, “He’s in a grump. Nothing can compare to Atlas, so he’s gonna make sure we all know that.”

“Shut up,” Jean mutters, “You know the only people stupid enough to get into this line of work these days are the glory hounds. You can smell the desperation – it _reeks_.”

“ _You’re wrong._ ”

Jean looks up in surprise – one of the J-Techs has stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned back to him, his expression indignant. A scowl knits his thick eyebrows together, and the wrinkle in his nose bunches up the smattering of freckles littered carelessly across his cheeks.  He’s tall and broad, but there’s something hesitant in his demeanour – as if half his body wanted to keep walking when the other half wanted to stop and contest – but he clenches his fists at his sides to hold his indecision together.

“What?” Jean says, unblinking. A sneer curls up the corner of his mouth, and he raises his chin to try and make himself seems taller.

“I said – you’re _wrong_ ,” the man repeats, his tone more steeled, more resolute. “How do you know why they’re here, or what their motivations are. You’ve never met them.”

“I don’t need to know them,” Jean says, nodding his head towards the Kwoon Room, the sound of the Fightmaster’s barking orders reverberating through the metal walls. Beside him, Ymir sniggers, a goading “oooh!” whistling across her lips.

“I’ve seen all I need to see,” Jean continues hotly, “These kids can’t _fight_.”

“You’ve watched one bout,” says the man.

“Please. PPDC is scraping the barrel. Dragging kids off the street with the promise of air-time and fame. Doesn’t matter if they’ve been sitting on their asses all their life in some condo as far away from the Pacific as they can possibly get.”

“It doesn’t matter where they’ve come from, only if they care about –”

“No-one here is gonna be compatible – what do any of these kids know about facing Kaiju?”

The J-Tech – the man – huffs a breath of hot air, holding it in his cheeks like a balloon. He takes a step towards Jean and raises his clenched fist to his lips, pressing his knuckles firmly against his mouth, as if to hold in the words he wants to spit.

Jean cocks an eyebrow: _come on then. Bring it._ Eren’s temper simmers below his skin.

When the man says nothing, save for swallowing thickly, Jean sighs dramatically.

“Right. I thought as mu–”

“Idealism and heroism aren’t dead,” the man interrupts. “Maybe you think they are, but let me tell you – some people want to fight for what’s right. Some people want to fight to save the world, not just – not just to save their own skin. I’m sorry if you cannot see that.”

“ _You_ don’t know anything about me.”

The man blinks slowly, and his mouth breaks out into an insipid smile.

“You’re right. I _don’t_.”

Jean grinds his teeth, throwing a glare back over his shoulder at Ymir, seeking backup – but her palm is clamped across her mouth and snickers are wriggling through her fingers, delight alive in her eyes. She gives a flick of her chin in the direction of the tech, and Jean huffs – brooding and bitter – as the tech ducks his head and reddens, before turning tail and jogging after the rest of his group who have left him behind.

Jean doesn’t hesitate to shove Ymir hard in the side, making sure his elbow jabs her directly in the kidneys – but she just laughs harder, her ugly guffawing breathy and ridiculous.

“Let me guess,” she sniggers, “Wouldn’t happen in Tokyo?”

“Shut up!”

“Who’s the ass now, huh?”

“I hope a Kaiju eats you.”

“Harsh.”

“If you two are quite done,” Krista interrupts, her hands on her hips and her diplomatic expression twitching as she fights to maintain it amidst their squabbling, “The hangar, shall we?”

“Whatever you say, babe,” Ymir grins, swinging her arm around Krista’s shoulders and pulling her into her side. “Should introduce Jean to his chief mechanic, so she can repair his ego.”

Krista throws a dirty look back over her shoulder, her lips pursing around a subtle smile.

“Quite,” she says.

Jean hates them both.

As Ymir and Krista saunter down the corridor, Jean grabs another look over the heads of the cadets. Another pair is on the mat, squaring up with bō between their fingers, and a look completely devoid of fear upon their cement-set brows.

 _Look at them_ , Jean thinks. _They’ve never experienced real pain. What do they know about flying Jaegers._

Nobility is a wasted breath. When blood is pouring from your mouth, when electricity is searing scars into your skin, when you’re lying at the bottom of the ocean – what fucking good is nobility? Jean clenches his fists at his side as they walk, his steps becoming a prowl.

Nobility died with Eden Spirit; nobility died when Ymir got cancer in her lungs from saving the world; nobility died when Jean was made to suffer Eren’s Drift time and time again, because no-one ever cared what it was doing to them both.

Justice, heroism, gallantry – there’s no room in concrete walls for those sorts of ideals anymore.  There’s no point in TV spots and fame and glory. There’s only survival, and you have to do what must be done to grab that with both hands.

Jean’s just trying his damnedest not to meet a disappointing end. Maybe he had goals once. Maybe there was a part of him that the storm didn’t touch.

Not anymore. He’s drenched right through.

 

* * *

 

The hangar floor does something to settle his nerves, the familiar sounds of pneumatic drills and flying sparks somehow an extinguisher upon the simpering fire that has a vein popping in his forehead, and every other thing Ymir does, a scab that he wants to flick away. The clouds are still heavy beyond the high windows, glass crusted with grime and dirt and motor vapour, filtering the already grey light, so that it is flat and dull as it hits the hangar floor. Even Johtun’s armour looks dull, it’s usually silver-chrome now muddy, like snow beneath car tracks and spread across dirt roads.

The hangar bustles with techs, frantic and busy, as if they’re five minutes from a drop – Jean is jostled left and right as greasy mechanics haul ass between cargo bays, and porters grunt and grumble about the cold that permeates even here, out of the sleet-like rain. Each tick of the War Clock mounted above the hangar door is a _clunk_ , keeping a steady rhythm in the chaos. It’s been ten days since the last Kaiju attack. Since Shrieker and Shanghai. The manic energy in his system has yet to dissipate – it feels like a coil, like a spring too tightly wound. It’s probably what’s keeping his tether so short. 

Ymir’s eyes dart around the floor and land upon a pair of mechanics in blue overalls, exchanging obtuse laughter beneath the shadow of Johtun: one is a man, dark complexion and sheared head, and the other is a girl with a high ponytail of chestnut-brown hair, which swings back and forth as she talks. She has an oily rag in her hands, and the cuffs of her overalls are stained with motor fluid. Ymir makes a beeline straight for them, and Krista trots to keep up. Jean reluctantly drags his feet.

They’re clearly friends – friends in a way Jean never was with his tech team back in Tokyo. Sure, they all had good relationships, they worked like a unit, like a machine, each person a well-oiled cog in a system perfected – but they were never the sort of people Jean would choose to drink with in the evening after a terrible drop, unless they were already at the bar.

But Ymir tackles the man into a rough headlock, grinding her knuckles into his head with a sprite grin as he wails and struggles free. They’re both loud and boisterous, and it irks Jean like an itch.

“Oi, grumpy!” Ymir hollers – and she means Jean. “Get your ass over here and meet Sasha! You’re her problem now!”

Jean trudges into the fray already weary, and doesn’t even get the name of the man before Ymir drags him away, complaining loudly about an issue with her spinal clamp during her last test Drift, before the woman with the ponytail literally throws herself at him. He leaps a step back, his hands already up in defence.

“Hiya!” she twinkles, exhausting excitement in her eyes. Words fly from her mouth rapid fire, and Jean is instantly overwhelmed. “I’m Sasha! You’re Jean – I already know who you are, ‘course. I have your trading card – well, not yours. Atlas’, obviously. Her 2016 original edition, and her 2018 remastered. And I have the special edition from Vladivostok! That was an amazing drop. One of a kind. I must’ve watched that fight twenty dozen times, y’know, and I –”

The blue screen of death proliferates across Jean’s dazed stare. Sasha barks a laugh.

“–it’s an honour to meet you, Mister Kirschtein.  Can I call you Jean? I’m gonna call you Jean. I’m gonna be your chief engineer. Everything you need, you come to me. Any problem, I can fix it. Mark IVs are my specialty. No sweat.”

She grabs Jean’s hand and shakes it vigorously, near wrenching his arm from its socket.

“That’s … great,” he croaks weakly.

“Awesome! Right then, shall we get going? I bet you wanna see your new Jaeger. She’s a beauty. Gonna make all the other Jaegers jealous.”

She doesn’t release his hand, tugging him sharply away from the silver feet of Johtun, and across the hangar floor. She barrels through an unmarked doorway, J-Techs leaping from her path with practiced ease. She knows the labyrinth of concrete well, not pausing for breath as she navigates identical corridors, swinging through another door into a second deployment hangar.

It’s quieter than Johtun’s hangar, the energy less frenzied, less feverish. The low thrum of circular saws and blow torches echoes resolutely, but the chatter of quiet conversion is little more than a hum.

Not that Jean notices. Before him, proud and tall, stands the last of the Mark IV Jaegers. Two hundred and fifty feet, armoured all in bronze like some Roman centurion, mighty fists curled at her sides. His partner to be.

The feeling in his chest changes. Something tastes a little sweeter on his tongue. If it’s excitement, he hasn’t tasted that in a _very_ long time. For a moment, Atlas fades to the back of his mind, and the frayed ends of his nerves tingle.

“Sh – _shit_.”

Sasha sparkles beside him, finally dropping his hand, only to clench hers together beneath her chin.

“She’s one of a kind. Solid steel hull, everything’s alloy. Forty engine blocks per muscle strand. Hyper-torque driver for every limb and a state-of-the-art fluid synapse system, all digital. It makes Atlas look like a tin can in comparison. A tin can riddled with bullet holes, balancing on stilts. And missing one arm.”

“What weaponry?”

“I’ve studied your fighting techniques and strategies – even Shanghai - so that we're kitted out with the best possible arsenal. Got my team doing some last minute mods right now. We’re talking dual I-19 plasma caster – way more efficient than your old particle canon on Atlas, I’ve even managed to half the charge-up time – and two cauterising swords. I looked at Corinthian Wasp’s sting blades and thought: how can I make this cooler? I know. _Lasers_.”

“Laser swords? Cool. That’s actually … _really cool_.”

“Damn straight!” Sasha grins. “I figure if it’s the end of the world, I can live out my Star Wars dreams however I damn well please.”

She turns her eyes back upon the Jaeger, her index finger fixed to her lips.

“We’ve also got propulsion in both elbows and kneecaps – electromagnetic, obviously – we’re not about that nuclear crap anymore,” she continues thoughtfully. “Should improve dynamic punches. Uh – I wanted to add a gauss rifle, but the boss said no to the weight distribution, so we’ve got flash grenades in both shoulders, which should be neat – oh, and she’s multi-layered with CELL-TIP for skeletal-specific targeting –”

 “She got a name yet?” Jean interrupts. Sasha bites down upon her lower lip, unable to resist.

“Not officially,” she grins, wiping her greasy hands on her rag, before tossing it across her shoulder. She rolls up the sleeves of her overalls to reveal two forearms bright with tattoos, illustrating Jaegers from across the years. Jean recognises Atlas instantly, the silhouette lanky and the shoulders broad. Next to Atlas, still a little red-raw around the edges, is his new partner. Sasha's eyes crinkle at Jean’s clear amazement. “The powers that be are still fighting over what to christen her, but I’ve taken to calling her Whiskey. Whiskey Dawn. I have a feeling it’ll stick.”

Jean gazes up at the Mark IV. She’s fearsome, all bronze and steel armour, her lines sleek and aerodynamic. The makings of a plasma caster envelope her right arm, and soon to be her left. She must have fifty feet on Johtun, if not more. She looks like a gladiator. Like a liberator. Like a victor.

“I can tell she’s gonna be a drama queen,” Sasha chuckles. “Needs a bit of wear and tear to settle in, but I think the name suits her. She’s kinda flashy. Sunrise tomorrow, come to the hangar and look at how the light reflects off her visor. Gold and liquid, it is.”

“Like whiskey.”

“Like whiskey,” Sasha affirms. Jean offers her a rue smile.

“I'm looking forward to taking her for a test drive,” he admits, “Maybe it’ll make being Ymir’s bitch slightly bearable. Emphasis on _slightly_.”

Sasha props her hands on her hips, her stance wide and her expression staunch and decisive.

“Forget about Ymir. Whiskey will be the star of the show. The boss already wants to move you to Manila after you find a co-pilot. The Icebox is only formality. Me and you – and Whiskey – will be out of here in no time. Front line is waiting for us.”

Jean’s smile becomes tight. The front line is where he wants to be. Fight, kill, survive. Make it through to tomorrow. It’s what he’s always known.

The words of the J-Tech from before echo loudly across the hangar, or maybe just across his head. He’s angry again.

 

* * *

 

Jean is grateful for a moment’s respite after the Marshal’s briefing. He’s been on his feet almost twenty-four hours, unable to sleep on the plane from Tokyo, a pile of pre-briefing paperwork an ample distraction, and the thought of Eren a weight on his mind.

His trunks are already in his quarters – a dingy, yellow-lit concrete cell that is a little bit damp and a little bit miserable. There’s a single bed pushed up against one wall that creaks as he flumps down upon it, and the shelves above him are lop-sided and bare.

He strips out of his travel clothes, still wet from the rain and a little crispy from the salt whipped up by the seafront, and changes into sweats and the first sweater he can find – crew-neck, blue, soft on the inside –

It’s Eren’s. He didn’t realised he’d packed it. It smells a little musty now, like cramped spaces and aircraft holds. It’s cold.

Jean throws his leather jacket on over the top, fingers toying with the Atlas patch slapped upon his breast unconsciously.

The canteen is milling with people. Jean ducks and weaves beneath trays, and no-one pays him an ounce of heed. His ego twinges, but maybe it’s not the worst thing. The anonymity feels safe, leaves him to his thoughts, keeps him out of the firing line of people with things to say about Shanghai. He’ll stay low for a while, whilst he finds his footing and gets a chance to whip some of those new recruits into shape, and then –

And then he’ll show them, when the first drop inevitably arrives. He’ll show them he can keep a Drift intact. He’ll show them he’s no washed-up pilot. He’ll show them what Atlas Rogue could’ve done, if they’d just had a little more time, or if Eren had just been a little less angry –

A tray of food is thrust into his hands, accompanied by a gruff _hmph_. It’s Ymir, still looking much the same as she did earlier, swamped in dark layers, her hair a scruffy mess.

“Sit with us,” she orders, “Hope you like smoked salmon. It’s all we fucking have here.”

Jean blinks and looks down at his food. The piece of fish is a little grey. The vegetables are steamed and wilted, probably out of a tin. His stomach growls, but not in a good way.

“What I wouldn’t give for some meat!” Ymir laments, leading the way to a free table. Krista is already there, chatting amicably to the bald tech from earlier – who Jean figures must be Johtun’s lead engineer – and Sasha, who is shovelling the salmon gruel into her mouth with impressive speed (but less impressive accuracy). “I could eat a whole fucking reindeer!”

Jean grabs a seat on the bench next to Ymir, keeping his head ducked. The other engineer is called Connie, and he’s just as obnoxious as Sasha, but with a sense of humour more droll, which redeems him only slightly in Jean’s eyes. He’s telling Krista about some improvements he wants to make to their Pons System, and Krista is nodding politely – even if she’s dead behind the eyes. Ymir interrupts crassly, spewing food across her tray as she talks with her mouthful, and she begins to debate hotly with her tech, insisting she knows better.

Jean focuses on swallowing down his food – it requires that much effort, the fish cold and stodgy, and his stomach begging him to gag. What he wouldn’t give for a bowl of fluffy, white rice, or some sticky-sweet teriyaki –

“Oi!” Sasha shouts, sitting up suddenly, a piece of broccoli stuck between her teeth. She raises her hand, still clutching her fork, and waves at someone in the crowd. “Thomas! Daz! Marco! Over here, I saved you guys a seat!”

Jean glances up out of courtesy more than anything as a group of J-Techs approach the table. He bristles, but it’s only because he’s so used to it being him and Eren by themselves at dinner, refusing staunchly to interact with anyone below their station. Rangers very rarely associated with anyone but themselves, undoubtedly some sense of righteous self-importance ingrained within them through their line of work.

But the J-Techs look friendly enough, passing him by without so much as a look, greeting Sasha and throwing their trays down with laughter exchanged like a music Jean doesn’t know between them, saturating the air with unruly noise, and –

And one of them is the tech from earlier, because _of course it is_ , and his honey-coloured eyes lock with Jean’s immediately. The man blushes; Jean stares hard at his half-eaten dinner.

Should he leave? Would that make it more awkward? He feels like he wants to say something, the need to defend his wounded pride clawing and making a ruckus in his throat, but he knows none of that would amount to legible words –

“Hey, it’s that guy from earlier!” Ymir exclaims, thumping Jean in the side to get his attention, despite it already being laser-focussed. “Oh my God, Connie, you missed a fucking treat – he handed Jean’s ego to him on a plate, it was _hilarious_ –”

The tech leans across the table, his cheeks still red. He meets Jean’s eyes again, but it’s fleeting. He’s clearly embarrassed. Jean hates him even more for it.

“I – I didn’t mean for it to come across that way,” he interjects desperately, as Ymir continues to regale an eager Connie with the details of their earlier encounter. “Please, I – I just thought it was unfair to blanket everyone with the same generalisation, that’s all – I didn’t mean any harm –”

“ _Mmph_ , Jean, you met Marco already?” Sasha pipes up, her cheeks bloated comedically with a mouthful of food. “He helped out on Whiskey, you know? My best boy. Those plasma casters were both his design.”

Jean squints at the tech – Marco – as he pokes awkwardly at his food, clearly flustered.

“He thinks I don’t know how to choose my own co-pilot,” Jean says with his nose in the air. He’s not sure if he sounds as hostile as he wants – more like a petulant child told off by their parent.

“Trying to curry favour, eh, Marco?” Sasha smiles. Marco scratches the end of his nose, bashfully, but he pointedly avoids Jean’s drillbit stare now. “Resorting to underhand tactics to get the job is very not-you.”

“I wasn’t –” Marco says in his defence. “I just wanted to – I couldn’t –”

“You just said you were a tech,” Jean interrupts, in a deadpan. Marco stiffens. Sasha chews loudly, in earnest.

“I – I was,” Marco says slowly, his voice quiet. “I, uh – I quit.”

“Yeah,” Sasha grumbles, “Ten days ago, out-of-the-blue. My best engineer suddenly decided he wants to become a pilot, pulls a few favours out of his backside, and runs away to join the circus. Who saw that coming, huh?”

“Wait,” Ymir interrupts, launching back into the conversation by leaning across Jean’s personal space, jabbing at Marco with her pointer finger. “This kid’s trying out for the Mark IV? This guy? Is no-one else finding this fucking hilarious? No-one?”

Jean shoves her away, back into her seat, but when he looks forward again, Marco is watching him. The dull, canteen lights catch in his eyes, reflecting off flecks of gold. His stare in sincere, not abrasive. It’s the colour of wheat fields, rippled by the wind. No storms, no seas.

“I’m sorry,” Marco says plainly, talking to Jean. “About earlier. It probably wasn’t obvious, but I _am_ one of the cadets trying out for the co-pilot position. I know it’s probably against protocol to talk to you before trials, but I – about what you said earlier, I just couldn’t –”

Jean opens his mouth to say something – he doesn’t know what, but it’s probably going to be snarky and bitter – but it’s Sasha’s voice that comes out. Or, well – comes out of her mouth. Jean can’t break his silence.

“When are the candidacy trials?” she asks. “Tomorrow? I saw the Kwoon is booked all day.”

“Right,” Ymir says with a smirk, “Jean’s supposed to sit in on those. That’ll be fun. Shit, maybe you’ll get landed with someone who hasn’t got a chip the size of Alaska on their shoulder, and you’ll finally get that stick jimmied out of your ass. You should pick someone nice. It’ll be good for you. Eren always low-key terrified me. He had issues, man.”

“I don’t want someone nice,” Jean grumbles, putting down his cutlery and folding his arms in a huff across his chest. “I want someone _real_.”

“Wow, check out this edgelord over here –”

“Wanting to save people is real,” Marco says firmly, interrupting Ymir gracefully. “Wanting to serve the country, to serve the PPDC – that can be real. I stand by that. I really do.”

“Heroism gets you killed,” Jean smarts. _Heroism makes you miserable._

“Everything gets you killed,” Marco replies, easily, “The Kaiju don’t discriminate.”

God, his idealism _reeks_. The others make goading noises, and Jean resents them all, but Marco doesn’t waver, doesn’t blink. His eyes aren’t clouded, but nor are they naïve. There’s just honesty there, pure and unadulterated.

It reminds him of Eren, always so hot-headed and straight-forward, always spitting out whatever was on his mind –

No. _No_. It’s not like Eren. He just wants to make it so.

The similarity lies in far simpler a thing: they both get under his skin, this stranger and Eren, who was once a stranger, years ago. Sometimes the reason why is indecipherable – no words, just strings, moving his arms as if he were a puppet, acting out a show he knows the lines of, somewhere deep in his bones. Sometimes it feels as if he just walks into these things.

Something tickles in his blood. It’s hot. It feels like seething.

“Daaaamn,” Ymir sing-songs, swiping the bread roll from Jean’s plate and tearing off a chunk of it with her teeth. Her voice becomes muffled and ugly. “You got your ass handed to you by a _cadet_ , Jean. That’s way worse than a tech! And he’s probably gonna kick your ass in the Kwoon tomorrow. What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall! Serves you damn right for thinking you’re such a hot-shot, even though I seem to remember you got _kicked out_ of Atlas not long a –”

The Kaiju-warning siren blares with a loud, deafening wail. Jean’s head snaps towards the sound as the lights of the canteen flash blue and red, violently.

“Johtun Apostle, report to the Conn-Pod. Johtun Apostle, report to the Conn-Pod. Category III Kaiju on approach from the Breach. Helios Shrike already in pursuit. Johtun Apostle, report to the Conn-Pod.”

Ymir leaps from her seat, her tray forgotten, clattering on the table. She’s a whir, she’s a hurricane, she’s a flurry in black and leather, saying nothing as she flies from the canteen without looking back. Krista is with her, at her side without Jean even noticing her leave the table, gazing up at Ymir as Ymir stares forward.

Around them is chaos. People part like the sea for Ymir – a concentrated body of wind and steel and vortex force – but from the other tables, techs are jumping to their feet, scurrying madly towards the deafening sirens, abandoning half-eaten dinners. Commotion electrifies the air.

Jean watches Ymir’s back, cloaked in leather, as she disappears through the door just as it’s flooded with the panic of others.

The sirens pound in his head. He recalls the screeches of Shrieker, and then of Carla Jaeger, and then of Eren, seven-years-old and wailing for his already-dead mother. Connie rattles to attention, spilling his drink across the table top and tripping over his own feet as he tangles in the bench in his haste to chase his pilots to their Drivesuits. He presses a sloppy kiss to Sasha’s hairline, his hand fleeting in a squeeze of her shoulder, and then he’s gone too, on a mission, with a purpose.

The PA booms overhead, barking orders, summoning techs to their posts, ushering the Rangers to the Conn-Pod, repeatedly. The large, digital screens in the canteen flicker into life – news channels, grainy pictures, the familiar outline of Helios Shrike, yellow and white and goliath, powering through the waves of any other ocean. The feed flickers – and then there’s the dark blue shape of a Kaiju, ominous beneath the surface of the water, helicopters trailing it overhead as it slithers serpentine through the murky depths.

It’s heading for Hawaii. Five hours out. Helios Shrike is giving chase; Johtun Apostle has been called to assist. There are no other Jaegers on the American Pacific coast. It’ll probably be all over by the time Ymir and Krista arrive, let alone suit up.

Jean feels useless.  Hell, he feels worse than useless. He feels invisible.

He could do something. He has the skills to do something. He’s the only person in this damn room who’s ever killed a Kaiju, or piloted a Jaeger, or looked death in the eye and lived to tell the fucking tale.

But sitting here, in this canteen, he can do nothing. _Washed-up, indeed._

The commotion becomes background noise, which in turn becomes a haze, and he is suspended within it in a stupor. The words on the screen become squiggles, the voice of the newscaster obsolete. The PA is something he’s heard a dozen times. The fear in his bones is something he’s known so long that he hardly differentiates between it and every other emotion numbed out by this damn war. If he feels panic, if he feels worry – he doesn’t know. He can’t remember.

Across the table, his eyes meet Marco’s. He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t run. He’s just watching Jean, and if everything around them is a blur, Marco’s eyes are a fixed point, bright and dewy and _something_.

Jean tilts his head and narrows his eyes.

He wonders how he can be expected to make a bond of trust with someone so quick that he might be able to fight again.

 

* * *

 

Johtun Apostle makes it to the fight. They rendezvous with Helios Shrike, and together they catch up with the Kaiju about twenty miles off the coast of Honolulu. The two Jaegers are quite the spectacle, Helios Shrike a warrior, a king clad in gold, a powerhouse of engineering prowess, and Johtun a silver bullet through the water, compact and scrappy and weather-worn.

The Kaiju is big, but slow, weighed down by bulky claws and enormous tail, fashioned like a stinger. Its six legs aren’t made for water or for swimming. The codename is Stinger. It’s uninspired, to say the least.

The crowd in the canteen is hushed – Jean expects most of them are the trainees he’s meant to greet tomorrow. There’s something in their eyes that’s green. Something in their wide-eyed stares that’s still horrified. Something in the way they all lean forward and punch the air as Helios lands a strike, that is eager and unabashed. Jean resents it - or, he tells himself he resents it.

Jean finds himself urging Johtun on, whispers scattering across his lips. Sasha is crowing over Connie’s new upgrades, out of her seat and cheering when Johtun intercepts a blow heading for Helios right flank, Johtun's razor claws catching the pincer in an iron grasp, before tearing into the Kaiju's flesh and spilling blue across the sloshing sea.

Helios Shrike is good. Jean’s never found Reiner and Bertholdt the easiest of people to assist – although maybe that was the fault of Eren, who never really got on with them well – but their military precision translates well on this side of the screen. It’s unnerving to watch from somewhere beyond the Conn-Pod, where flashing lights and the scrabble of LOCCENT in his ear aren’t ardent distractions. There’s no Eren yelling in his head for direction from Reiner and Bert, who would so often forgo words and expect Atlas to carry the weight of their decisions quite literally. Helios has always been a solo operation, and they move with power and perfection, almost oblivious of Johtun jostling with the waves they throw up in their wake.

Reiner and Bert were both military men before the war. Cold and hard and damn terrifying – and it shows. It’s what makes them good, but it’s also what makes Ymir great.

Jean cannot speak for Krista – he doesn’t know her as well, doesn’t really know her story – but Ymir is, without a doubt, the best pilot in the PPDC. She’s scrappy. She’s unpredictable. She adapts.

Once, she told Jean that she was in the police, before the war. Another time, she was a stockbroker (he laughed), and another, she was a professional triathlon athlete, with dreams of the Olympics. She was none of those, of course. She delivered pizza for a living.

It’s her greatest asset. She was a normal person, affected in normal-people ways. 

Johtun Apostle sinks her claws deeper into the pincer of the Kaiju, wrenching it as hard as she can to the side, opening up the chest of the beast to the onslaught of Helios’ Tesla fists. Each pummel earns a raucous cheer.

Jean feels bitter. Johtun’s doing the grunt work. They should be getting the cheers, especially in their own base, but –

“The left pincer –”

Jean rips his eyes from the screen as words drip from Marco’s lips, barely audible.

“ –you’ve gotta get rid of it, before –”

The sound of shattering metal makes Jean’s blood run cold, and on the screen, he sees Helios’ right arm go flying in a thunder of sparks and hissing coolant, torn off by the free pincer of the Kaiju.

“ _Shit_ ,” Jean hisses, his eyes whipping back to Marco, who sits oblivious to Jean's demanding stare in his own sort of stupored prayer to the big screen.

Helios retreats into the waves, undeterred, and Johtun springs away from the Kaiju, bouncing like a rabbit to Helios’ flank. Words are obviously exchanged – and even if Jean cannot hear them, he can imagine them: Krista’s concern, Reiner’s lack of it, Bert’s silence, and Ymir’s ferocity. Maybe she cracks a joke about who’s the assist now. Maybe Krista scolds her for it being _not the time_. LOCCENT is probably yelling in Helios’ ear. They’ve lost one fist, and one of their incinerators. Johtun doesn’t specialise in heavy artillery, so the team has definitely taken a hit.

“Helios has to take the damage,” Marco murmurs. His fingers come to rest upon his mouth, and he leans forward on his knees, transfixed. “He’s gotta be the scapegoat. Johtun has the saws.”

Helios is moving again – a direct charge at the Kaiju, into the fray of its blindly swinging claws. He ducks beneath the strike of the tail, and grapples the right claw with his remaining arm, but is prey to the left, which skewers the Jaeger through the leg and holds tight and fast.

“He’s sacrificing himself,” Jean finds himself whispering, half horror, half amazement. Helios struggles, and Jean can almost hear his joints creaking and his wires tearing. His eyes fly back to Marco.

“Wei Tang formation. Good job,” Marco is murmuring, as if a pundit at the races. “Johtun, go right – it’s less dominant – yes!”

Johtun makes a run for the Kaiju, her arms and legs pumping, and uses the shoulder of Helios as a springboard, leaping over his head and coming down hard on the right pincer with her razor saw in a spurt of blue blood erupting like a fountain. The Kaiju screeches, its right pincer dismembered, Helios throwing it aside into the ocean with titanic resilience.

The spear-like tail comes for them again, making a jab for Johtun, but she’s too quick, and Helios catches it in his free arm in the shadow of the blind spot. Johtun spins on her heel, slicing through the membrane of the tail like its nothing more than butter, her silver armour now blue from head-to-toe.

The crew in the canteen shriek and holler in delight, fists pounding on the table tops, vibrating the abandoned dinner trays upon the plastic. Jean clenches his fingers in his lap and hisses out a _yes_ between his teeth, but Marco’s brow remains furrowed.

“ –don’t get cocky, Ymir,” he hushes, gnawing into his lower lip obsessively. “It’s going to try and death roll and take Helios with it –”

Almost as soon as Marco says it, the Kaiju throws itself into the water, twisting over onto its back and taking Helios with it, beneath the water. The cheers of the others in the canteen turn to horrified gasps.

The sea froths and foams and surges as Helios struggles to break the surface. Johtun leaps upon the belly of the Kaiju, her twin saws slicing through the legs of the Kaiju like propeller blades through cloud, but the Kaiju lurches, and she’s sent flying into the sea, her body booming with a thunderous splash.

“They have to get Helios free –”

Johtun is not deterred – and within that determination, Jean sees Ymir’s frustration and her stubbornness, as if he were looking upon her, herself, clad in silver armour amidst the waves. She jumps upon the belly of the Kaiju once more, leaping high – and she twists mid-air, a move Jean knows is Krista’s signature, the blade at her elbow snapping erect as she piles into the water head-first.

The splash is so large that it buffets the reporting helicopter, and the screen becomes static for an unbearable moment – there’s a collective gasp of horror, and Jean presses his lips into a firm line.

Silence permeates for one, two, three seconds –

He glances at Marco. The man’s eyes are tightly closed, his fingers knitted together in prayer. The words whisper-soft upon his lips are no words of advice, dabbling in things like God and Heaven and such things Jean stopped believing in long ago.

"– _but deliver us from evil_ –"

The feed returns in a splutter, and the camera pans out across flat ocean. Someone in the canteen cries out; someone else gasps. Jean doesn’t deny his heart surging into his throat.

 _Ymir, you stupid fuck_ –

The helicopter wheels around, the camera whirling across the waves below as it turns a full 180 – and Jean wheezes over the breath he’s perpetually holding.

Kaiju Blue spills out across the Hawaiian sea like a slick of oil, iridescent in the bright sunlight – and amidst its murky colours is the upturned corpse of a monster, and the shining, triumphant silhouettes of both Johtun and Helios, sans one arm, and sporting a large, gaping wound in his thigh.

Both Jaegers seem to look at each other, almost as if they could be talking, and a chorus of relieved laughter and excited shouts fill the high ceilings of the Anchorage Shatterdome. For a moment, the cold air is kept at bay.

Helios Shrike raises his remaining arm to Johtun, offering her a fist to bump. Johtun takes a step back, and Jean sniggers as she stoops and digs around in the water, before standing straight again, Helios’ missing arm cradled in her claws. Somehow, the Jaeger bares Ymir’s swagger, standing with a hip cocked, a smarmy attitude possessing her silver frame.

“Thank God!” Sasha exclaims then, her voice far shriller than Jean was expecting. She throws her hands up in the air, and tugs her hair free of her ponytail, only so she can run her fingers through its tangles in exasperation. “Ymir is so fucking lucky! I _guarantee_ most of that was Krista – she is Ymir’s guardian angel, I swear!”

Jean smiles tightly and nods, and doesn’t remark on how many times Atlas and Johtun have fought side by side.

“Well!” Sasha remarks, hauling herself to her feet and slapping her hands upon the table top. “That was exciting. I should probably go find Connie – and bring him a fresh pair of boxers, because he probably crapped himself a lot during that. Jean, Marco – I’ll catch you boys later!”

Words are few and failing between them then, silence sitting at the table next to Jean. Marco stares pointedly up at the TV screen, watching the helicopters rove around the victorious Jaegers. Jean pokes at his food.

That was … impressive. Marco clearly knows how to fight - he was whispering as if he were on the LOCCENT bridge, or even as if he were inside another pilot's head, moving in tandem through the ocean. Wei Tang formation - that's not something everyone can whip out in casual conversation. That's not something just anybody knows. Jean struggles to swallow his pride, it sticking like a hairball in his throat. A strange feeling seems to poke and prod at Jean’s consciousness, as if someone is trying to get him to realise something incredibly obvious.

 “You … you’re good,” Jean presses, and it almost feels like an insult, the way it slithers from between his teeth. He doesn’t mean it that way – he’s not trying to be spiteful. He's genuinely impressed. He just still feels a little bruised from earlier. “You … _know_ shit.”

Marco flings his eyes away from the screen, as if he wasn’t even watching, just looking – and then he smiles, rubbing the tip of his nose with his finger again.

“Well,” he admits, “You’d hope so. I quit my job because I … _know shit_.”

Jean huffs – it’s almost a snort of derisive laughter. Marco’s tongue peaks between his teeth as he smiles. His eyes drop to the table top for a moment – and then he presents Jean with his hand.

“My name’s Marco,” he says, and Jean stares at his hand in confusion.

“I know,” he says slowly.

“I know you know,” Marco chuckles, looking at his hand and then withdrawing it back across the table. “Yeah. I just – I just wanted to start over. A proper introduction. I think we started badly earlier, and I – I don’t want you to not consider me tomorrow because of –”

“You’re just trying to cover your ass so that I don’t sack you come sunrise. Right. Selfless.”

“Well, I’m not very good at lying. It’s true. I don’t want to stay in J-Tech forever. But I think – I think we’d be a good match. So please don’t dismiss me.”

Marco ducks his head and slides out from the bench, crunching his soda can in his fist as he picks up his tray and looks for the trash. He stands tall, earnestness in his expression even now, and it makes Jean feel like shrivelling up. 

“Wait,” Jean says, and Marco stops, looking back over his shoulder. Jean is unable to meet his eyes, staring at the knot of Marco’s overall sleeves just above the line of his belt. He pauses a moment before asking, “Did you know who I was? Before. In the hallway.”

“Yeah, I did,” Marco says.

“But you said all that pretentious shit anyway.”

Marco smiles, cocking his head to the side. His eyes crinkle up into crescent moons.

“Yeah. I did.”


	2. you are a weapon (and weapons don't weep)

**MARCH 16, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

The Kwoon Room is almost identical to the one in Tokyo – grubby concrete, exposed pipes, and crash mats that might never have seen better days. The smell of sweat is unpleasant in the air, ingrained deep within the punching bags strung up from the ceiling, within the hand grips on the bō stacked upon the wall, within Jean’s skin the moment he steps through the door.

All eyes are on him in a flash, and it passes quickly into the realm of uncomfortable, the pervading feeling of being put on a stage beneath a spotlight and auctioned off to the highest bidder, being unshakable. There must be twenty trainees at least – all different shades of green, all desperate to impress. Jean has never felt so much nervous energy in a room before, and it doesn’t gel well with him – it makes him uneasy too. It’s not a good basis for a Drift connection, and he doesn’t need to be a pilot to know that.

Fightmaster Levi is a formidable man, despite standing at only five-foot-three. His eyes are fortified steel, and there’s a ripple in his jaw that never seems to dissipate, slicing into every word that leaps from his cutting tongue.

Jean wonders if he’s bitter too. Fightmaster Levi survived the defeat of Eden Spirit almost unscathed – he walked out of the Conn-Pod on two feet with a cut across his cheek, dragging the unconscious, armless body of Marshal Smith out the door in a river of oozing blood. The will to fight never died. Jean wonders if he’d take up the mantle of a Drivesuit again, if the opportunity arose. He was once cloaked in the title of Humanity’s Strongest – does humanity not need that spokesperson again?

He watches Levi closely, following his sharp steps as he paces the room, briefing his trainees. Jean remains stuck to the wall at the back, arms folded and feigning casual – but wonders if that what he looks like to everyone else around him? Both he and the Fightmaster were kicked from the Jaegers prematurely, after all.

 _Unlikely_ , he thinks. _Levi is terrifying. You just look like an ass._

Levi’s words are sharp: he explains that just because they’re looking for a co-pilot doesn’t mean someone will be chosen. It all depends on Drift compatibility, and that can take years to build, at the brink of neural and physical limits, if it’s even possible at all. He throws a stern look over his shoulder at Jean.

“It’s more likely to be impossible,” Levi says. It takes Jean a second to realise he’s been slighted.  He scowls.

“Alright,” he says gruffly, pushing off the wall. He shrugs out of his jacket and toes off his work boots, stepping onto the floor mat beside the Fightmaster. He turns to face the crowd of expectant faces. There’s not a single Eren in the fray. Not a single mind he can feel. Might as well get it over with. “Let’s get started. Someone pass me a bō.”

Jean was right, of course. They’re all useless, all as flat as the grey, Alaskan light. There’s no current, no storm – not even a breeze, with any of them. Each knock of his bō against another sounds hollow, and he has more than half the cadets on their asses before they even get a strike in. He should feel smug in that knowledge, thinking back to yesterday, and then to Mikasa, and then back to the PPDC council who authorised the stupid-ass decision to move him from the Atlas team to the edge of God-forsaken nowhere.

But he’s not. He’s not smug, he’s not feeling haughty, or superior, or any combination of remotely self-satisfied emotion. He knocks another kid on the floor, taking her legs out from beneath her with a practiced strike that he knows Eren would’ve leapt over. He thinks the cadet’s name is Mina, but honestly he can’t remember, nor bring himself to care.

All he can think is: _if I can’t find a pilot, Whiskey will never be able to ride._

He would have to watch Ymir’s back disappear into the crowds a second time, a third time, _indefinitely_. The feeling of uselessness, of idleness, would drown him like the sea at storm. Without the drop, without the Drift – he’d be left to his own thoughts, and he really, really doesn’t like the sound of that. He’s been eleven days without the Drift already, and going cold turkey like this is playing havoc with his nerves – and his temper.  

“She’s no good,” Jean says sharply, stepping back and resting his bō at his hip. “She’s cut. Who’s next?” The cadet looks meek as she lays on her back in a daze for a moment, before scrambling to her feet, her eyes glinting with disappointed tears. Jean swallows thickly – he doesn’t want to see her cry. Hell, it shouldn’t matter so much to them that they’d be on the point of tears –

“Fightmaster, sir!”

The door of the Kwoon clatters open and slams shut, and it’s like a signal flare goes off inside Jean’s head. Levi looks up from his clipboard with a scowl and minimal interest.

“Cadet,” Levi says sourly, “You’re late. What part of 0500 hours was not clear from my instructions?”

Marco stands in the doorway, sweat on his brow and his hair swept back in unruly cowlicks, looking flustered and rumpled. He’s in tech overalls again, undone at his collar, and sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His face is red from running. Jean quirks his eyebrows in a silent question.

“Well, cadet?” Levi barks, and Marco yelps to attention, arms behind his back and feet planted wide.

“Sir!” he quips, “Johtun Apostle just came in, and my assistance was needed in the hangar bay, sir!”

Levi scowls – or at least, his scowl deepens. Jean’s not sure the muscles in his face know anything else but a hewn frown. He takes the pencil tucked behind his ear, and scratches a note on his clipboard – probably something scathing next to Marco’s name.

“We have other techs,” he says courtly, “I shouldn’t let you in here. Tardiness doesn’t save lives.”

Marco opens his mouth to protest – but closes it just as quick, pressing his lips into a thin, yet berated line as his eyes fall to the floor.

But he doesn’t need to defend himself.

“No,” Jean says, quite resolutely. He leans his weight on his bō, crossing one ankle over the other, resting his chin on the flat end. He’s not sure if he looks indifferent, or a fool. He’s always been an expert at straddling that fine line.

“I wanna try him,” Jean continues, giving a sharp nod of his head at Marco. “He can’t be any worse than what you’ve already pitted me against, Fightmaster.”

Levi looks between Jean and Marco, the corners of his lips twisting downwards. He blinks slowly.

“Alright, Bodt. You’ve got one chance.”

The twist in Marco’s lips seems almost pleased of itself, and he immediately starts unbuttoning the front of his overalls down to his belt, wriggling out of the sleeves and knotting them around his waist. Beneath, he’s wearing a white tank top, grubby with streaks of motor oil and black thumb prints, threadbare where it stretches across his Roman chest. Dog tags dangle from his neck, their glint dull silver, but he tucks them beneath his vest, their outline straining against the fabric.

He steps out of his boots carefully, and catches the bō Jean tosses him with one hand, not breaking eye contact with Jean, until he bows.

Jean swallows thickly. Something wriggles in his gut – expectation? Is he … _eager_?

“Johtun’s back, huh?” Jean prompts, stepping sideways as they begin to circle each other. His feet are light, he steps silent – it’s a prowl, it’s predation, it’s Atlas’ beast in his blood. “How’s she doing?”

“Good,” Marco retorts, settling his hands into a comfortable position upon the staff. There’s a sheen of sweat already upon his shoulders, clinging to each and every curve of muscle beneath his skin. Freckles dapple his collar like the shadow of rain drops on glass. Each breath is heavy and short, his chest inflating in anticipation. “Shall we?”

“First to four strikes marks a win,” Jean states, a quirk in his lips he hopes goads Marco on. “You got that?”

“’Course. Remember, it’s a dialogue,” Marco says, “Not a fight. It’s about compatibility, not whether you can come out on top.”

“You remember that I’ve done this before, right?” Jean snarks, “You just afraid that I’m gonna beat you on the floor, huh?”

“If that’s what you need to feel better about yesterday–” Marco huffs, “–then feel free to try. But I promise you, I’m – good!”

Marco lunges with his bō, but Jean knocks it to the side with ease, spinning his staff in his hand to bring the end sharply into contact with Marco’s side. He lets out a grunt of pain, wincing where the staff strikes his kidneys. Jean steps back, brazenly spinning his bō across his fingers, transferring it from one hand to the other, and back again, without breaking focus. His mind feels _alight_.

“Not seeing it yet,” Jean grins arrogantly.  “I thought you wanted to be a _hero_. One-zero, by the way.”

Marco is swift and deft, dexterity in his fingers admirable, and a power in his arms that Jean reckons could pin him to the floor if he deigned to give him an opening. But his strikes are predictable, as if he’s reciting a catalogue of moves, repeating their names inside his head, assessing their power, their attack, their chance of making contact with Jean’s skin.

There’s focus in his eyes – a fire not born on the pyre of honesty, but one that illuminates it. No lines of lighting – but the flared and floral patterns that lightning leaves in the barks of summer trees. No argument about what a good man should be. Pauses for breath between the violence. Jean can feel that focus nudging at his own consciousness.

But Marco’s not trying to show off – not like the other cadets, squabbling like children for who can spin their bō the fastest, or who has the best footwork, or who is able to slide out of range through a one-handed cartwheel.

Marco’s jaw is set, and it’s a mortar-like integrity that that spans his broad chest and lifts his chin up high, even as Jean lays another strike to Marco’s temple, halting his bō just millimetres from Marco’s skin.

“Two-zero,” Jean smirks, light on his feet as he dances back into position. “I’m disappointed, greenie. Maybe you should go run back to J-Tech, huh?”

Jean fights dirtier than most – and he knows this. If you can cheat your way to victory, you cheat. Whatever makes the fight easier, and _over_. He deflects Marco’s strikes with spins of his bō, and changes his grip moments before a lunge, before Marco is able to react and adapt his stance. He aims for weak points: kidneys, sternum, knees, ankles – because he knows they sting when struck.

He makes a dive for Marco’s feet, his speed and his skill he advantage as he knocks Marco off-balance, and sends him to the floor with a resounding _thump_.

He grins in triumph, and turns his back on Marco without delivering the point-claiming blow, striding back towards his corner of the mat. But Marco grunts, lifting himself up on his shoulders and spinning around, the flat of his foot connecting with the inside of Jean’s knee with such force that Jean falls flat on his face.

“Urmph!” he groans, and he knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that that was a bastardisation of _his_ move, and that _Eren would’ve jumped it_.

He pushes up on his hands, but Marco’s weight on his back – hot and heavy – slams him back to the floor again, and the flat of Marco’s bō is at his throat.

Marco’s voice is right in his ear as he laughs breathily in delight – a shudder ripples down Jean’s spine, all the way to his toes.

Anger bubbles in Jean’s throat, cruel and spiteful – but as he turns his face to the side, cheek pressed flush to the matt, what blooms upon his face is a wicked grin. His nerves tremble like the strings on a guitar, vibrating and humming, and he sees the thrill of it reflected in Marco’s eyes.

“You’re _learning_ ,” he quips, unable to restrain himself. Marco rolls off him, offering Jean a hand to pull him to his feet.

“I’d hope so,” Marco retorts, “Isn’t that the point of proving yourself?”

He adjusts his bō in his grip, curling his fingers around the wood. Jean’s eyes are drawn to the way his knuckles whiten and the tendons extrude from beneath his tanned skin.

“It’s two-one, by the way.”

Jean’s breath comes fast in his chest – is he that out of shape? It’s been eleven days, and he’s spent them all moping – is he out of breath?

The cold air burns and tastes like iron, and somehow – it’s good. It tastes like the chase, like the thrill of running, like the cardio burn in your muscles after a sprint. Marco is assertive, reactive, adaptive. Straightforward and simple at first, but logical – he’s learning Jean’s style, and he’s changing to match it. Their bō come to blows with the crack of thunder.

Eren was a spark. Jean remembers it well, a moment he sees in his head like a flare, like the ignition of a cigarette lighter, like a prick of light in a long, long dark. They’d been at each other’s throats for weeks in training, the quest for one-upmanship more pressing than any Jaeger, any Kaiju fight, any fear.

In the Kwoon, it had been lightning. The moment Eren’s fists has tangled in Jean’s shirt, and the heel of Jean’s hand had collided with Eren’s nose – all his neurons had some alight, symphonic, crescending, the crash of cymbals.

But Marco – it’s as if the boom of the thunder doesn’t die, but continues to reverberate through his sinew and his cartilage, carrying vibrations through his bones and pulling out chords from his muscles. It rumbles like a drumbeat, melodic, a background noise that you don’t know is there until you’re without it – and then the silence is deafening.

Eren was a searing burn, and Jean still carries those scars inside and out, but this – this man –

It’s a rippling warmth, invasive, cocooning – _securing_. It’s the reassuring burn of honey-warm liquor down his throat. Sunrise over a calm and silent sea, gold spilling out like calligrapher’s ink into the warming water.

The energy is different to anything Jean’s felt before. It locks him into place.

But it’s not _wrong_.

Strike. Block. Duck. Strike again. Jean makes another successful hit, but Marco follows it immediately with a cross-jab at Jean’s right shoulder, which has him stumble off balance. Three-two. Jean comes back with a stab at Marco’s knee; Marco steps across it, entangling Jean’s bō between his calves and yanking it from his grasp with a sharp twist. Jean baulks as the staff flies from his hands, leaving him undefended. Marco’s bō stops beneath his chin, almost coquettishly.

“Three-three,” Marco lauds, with a cavalier tilt of his chin. He’s enjoying himself.

“You’re really fucking desperate for your turn in the spotlight, huh?” Jean pants, his grin tempestuous. His blood is rollicking through his veins, rowdy, noisy, carefree. He launches an attack, but Marco knocks him to the side with ease. “I know a try-hard when I see one.”

“What’s the point if you’re not trying hard!” Marco counters, wheeling to the side out of Jean’s range, and jumping over the low-blow he tries to make. “I want to make the PPDC proud!”

“Wow, some Golden boy you are!”

“Forgive me for the absurd notion of wanting to fight to keep my planet safe!”

Jean whirls around, his back open for just a second – but Marco seizes it, making a lunge for Jean’s knees again.

Too slow. It’s predictable.

Jean passes his bō into his other hand, and makes a grab for Marco’s staff, seizing it with a tight yank. Marco falls forward, surprised and off-balance, crashing to his knees. He huffs, trying to hop to his feet, but his own bō meets him square in the chest, and pushes him backwards with a winding jab. He splutters, but his back hits the matt, and his eyes hit the ceiling.

Victorious, Jean twirls both staff in his hands, and finds that a laugh bubbles up from the pit of his stomach, not scathing, not mocking – just ecstatic.

“Four-three!” he crows, as Marco lets both his arms fall flat across the mat, his breathing laboured as his heart pummels the inside of his chest. “You tired, greenie? I bet –”

“Kirschtein!” Levi snaps, and the hum of electricity across the Kwoon is extinguished. “Enough! If you’re going to keep arguing with my cadets instead of fighting, I’ll sure as Hell see to it that Whiskey goes to Manila without you, believe me –”

“There’s no need,” Jean says, adamantly. He reaches out a hand to Marco, and Marco grasps it, his palm warm and a little sweaty, but his grip unyielding. Jean hauls him to his feet, a little out of breath. “I’ve seen what I need to see. He’s the one. He’s my co-pilot. We’re Drift Compatible.”

 

* * *

 

Ymir laughs. No – she fucking _cackles_ , no ounce of irony lost upon her. The only small victory Jean is allowed is when she laughs _so_ hard that her bruises from her spinal clamp begin to twinge, and her merciless teasing dissolves into her whining to Krista about how much she hurts after their encounter with the Kaiju.

Marco is hounded by congratulations, and Marshal Smith drills them with their training programme for the next few weeks, all based upon the assumptions that the next Kaiju through the Breach heads south, and can be Wasp’s or the Aussie Howler Foxtrot’s or the new Atlas’ problem, which Jean thinks is an unwise basis for plan if ever he heard one.

Jean tries to get a word in – he wants to say something to Marco, even if he hasn’t quite decided what that’s going to be – but Sasha grabs him, shuttling him away to get fitted for her Drivesuit, and Jean watches him go, resigned to anonymity for a little while longer.

Does he have to say anything at all? They will Drift – he knows that, just as he knows the sky beyond the ever-present bank of clouds is blue – but that doesn’t mean anything has to be said. He could just ride this out in silence, exchanging words only when they’re in the Conn-Pod, only when they’re in the heat of battle – maybe it would work better that way. Maybe the mistake that was made with Eren was that he allowed him to get inside his head – not just on a fleeting visit, not just in the Drift, but in all senses of the phrase. Eren is in his bones, in his blood, in his grit.

The sun rises at 6.23 AM, and Jean sneaks away to the hangar bay to watch it. He climbs up into the gangways, platforms of steel high above the hangar floor, at eye-level with the Jaegers, and dangles his feet over the edge, resting his chin on the metal handrails.

He thinks of Helios Shrike, and his silent pilots, and then of Wasp’s lead pilot, Annie Leonhardt, who brings nothing into the Drift with her, and then lastly of Ymir, and how she’s cycled through three co-pilots since the Glory Days, and yet remains the quantum rivet in Johtun’s success.

By all rhyme and reason, their success doesn’t lie in team playing. It’s ironic, Jean thinks – because the basis of this all is co-dependency, carrying the neural load together, forming a partnership deeper than any bond humankind can make alone.

The echoes of Carla Jaeger are like a ghost in his head, a haunting cry that exists like a spectre in his consciousness at all times. It’s called the Ghost Drift – the fragments of the neural handshake that remain between two co-pilots after the Drift. He can still feel his connection to Eren, and Eren can probably still feel him, thousands of miles away.

Go back four years, and Jean knows he was never planning to let someone else get beneath his skin like that.

Something about Marco tells Jean that this will be another futile exercise in stubbornness.  He should get to know him. Before he is burdened with the emotional baggage of whatever this Alaskan tech carries through the wake of the storm they all suffer.  

Jean wishes he was strong enough to weather it all alone. Relying on people – he’s seen how that turns out. He’s felt the Drift shatter into pieces all around him, this bond – this meant-to-be unshakable, unfathomable bond – that ties two souls together, and he still aches because of it. And that ache becomes frustration, and that so easily mutates to anger that he doesn’t want, but cannot suffocate. It’s easy to pretend you’re cold and hard and narcissistic – and he is a little bit of all those things – but the truth is that he’s weak. He’s weak because of who he has to be.

People are unreliable, even when you know what’s going on inside their heads.  And yet, if you want to survive –

There’s no other choice.

Jean casts his eyes up wearily; Whiskey stands before him, staring him down. She would do it all alone – there’s something in the way she stands there, like a warrior guarding the gates of the city of humankind. Place a spear in her hand and a combed helmet upon her head, and she would be not out of place amongst an empiric army, a general, a commander, a saviour.

A break in the clouds casts the first rays of dawn light through the high window of the Shatterdome, fragile and purple-blue at first as the sun battles with the veil of threatening snow in the Alaskan atmosphere. The violet shades upon Whiskey’s bronze armour are magnificent, peacock-rich and emperor-royal.

And then comes the orange and the yellow and gold of sunrise – illicit and bright and wonderful. It’s lucid and spectacular, and the dust particulates in the air waltz and whither in the streams of sunlight like flecks of suspended diamond. Whiskey’s visor glows amber-yellow, rich and liquid and on-fire.

Sasha was right.

And Jean drinks it all in, an alcoholic looking for a meaningful message at the bottom of the bottle.

 

* * *

 

Marco Bodt is a good person. Irrefutably, undeniably, and above all, infuriatingly _good_. And Jean struggles with it.

It was easier with Eren, who gave as good as he got. If Jean was snarky, Eren would be snarkier back, and they’d spat for a bit, and then laugh it off after leaving the Conn-Pod for the evening.

Marco Bodt knows all the J-Techs in the Alaska Shatterdome by name. He also knows their birthdays, the name of their mothers, and the grades they got in some math exam when they were twelve and a half. In fact, Jean is sure that of all the people living on site, Jean himself is the one person Marco _doesn’t_ talk to.

Sure, they exchange words – they have to. Wherever they go, they go together – Kwoon training, Conn-Pod fitting, the hangar for spec briefing. Jean finds himself pricklier than usual, sniping more than he’d care to, and boasting more than necessary to maintain his carefully constructed pride. He treats Marco – and everyone around them – harshly because of it, dissatisfied with anything less than perfect. The Drivesuits take too long to materialise – he wants to get on with the Drifting. He doesn’t like the new circuitry suits – they feel too different to his old suit in Atlas. The J-Techs are inexperienced – they fumble and fluster too easily, and Jean snaps at them about their ineptitude.

Marco doesn’t like it. He bristles, and he defends the techs in their incompetence, and sometimes he calls Jean out on it – especially when he knows more about the tech than Jean does. Jean huffs, his pride dented. He stalks from the Kwoon, the Conn-Pod, wherever they are, as soon as they’re finished, to go lick his wounds, alone.

They still click when their bō clack together, or when Jean lands a punch on Marco’s shoulder, or when Marco throws a high kick into the pads Jean wears upon his palms. Levi watches on with hawk-like fixation, his pen chicken-scratching upon his clipboard, and the only sounds leaving his lips low grunts, or the occasional: _again_. 

There’s unspoken synchronicity that Jean cannot deny – he was right, of course, as he often is. They _are_ compatible.

But they’re never alone, just the two of them, so Jean can never ask: _do you really know what you’ve gotten yourself into?_

Jean sits apart in the canteen for his compulsory three meals. He picks and prods at his food, and feels miserable. The waiting for a drop is driving him insane, and he knows they’re not even close to being ready to assist Johtun Apostle.

Sometimes Ymir and Krista sit with him – because none of the techs, save for Johtun’s engineer Connie, and Whiskey’s Sasha, will come within a barge pole distance of him and his stormy demeanour. He snaps too much. He thinks it’s his bond to Eren beginning to wither and die, and some part of him is desperate to cling on to it. He channels the anger of the Ghost Drift, but it’s not Eren’s breed of anger, always hurt but righteous. Jean's anger is egotistical and self-preserving.

The Marshal’s commands exist like a fog inside his head. Ymir’s jokes and jibes fly in one ear and out the other. Sasha’s incessant enthusiasm for Whiskey’s progress becomes yet another layer to the background noise. The War Clock continues to count up to an inevitability.

Marco’s breaths fill the silence when they fight. He’s frustrated. Jean wonders if Marco’s taken that from him.

At night, in the hours he can grab between the roll-call at five each day and the monstrous howl of the Arctic wind, Jean dreams of Atlas Rogue. Each and every drop he’s ever done merge into one in his head – he sees the bright lights of Hong Kong Bay, hears the gulls soaring over Tokyo, crunches through the ice floats of Vladivostok with Atlas’ mighty legs. On his right comes the blur of Corinthian Wasp, so fast and agile and sleek in her yellow and black war paint; on his left stands Helios Shrike, the strongest of all active Jaegers, bulging with muscle and impenetrable armour. Ahead is Eden Spirit, restored to all her former glory, striking in her military green and with her dual chain swords raised. Atlas’ Conn-Pod shakes, and Jean feels a sudden weight push down on his shoulder – Johtun Apostle launches herself over Atlas’ shoulder like a leap-frog, landing with a mighty splash, her compact body unfurling as she stands from a crouch.

She seems to be laughing, a wave of her razor-clawed hand coaxing Atlas on – coaxing Jean on. Eren laughs by his side and in his head: _let’s go! Let’s kill them all!_

And Jean tries to move, tries to push his feet down into the hydraulic motion rig strapped to each sole, tries to pump his arms and get Atlas running, but –

But it’s like swimming through treacle, and however hard he tries, Atlas never reacts as he wants, creaking and groaning and seizing up as tar seeps into her joints.

Jean looks behind him – Atlas turns her head too, the HUD following Jean’s movement. Is there a Kaiju chasing them? Do they need to run? To fight?

There never is. It’s always the same figure, standing off in the distance, tall and proud and statuesque. The sun rises behind it, casting it in shadow, but spilling gold across the sea and the ice until all around them blazes in a fire made for God.

It’s Whiskey Dawn. Wasp, and Helios, and Eden Spirit, and Johtun – they all are running on ahead, without them. Atlas Rogue gestures for Whiskey to follow, but she doesn’t budge. It’s not as if her legs are locked in the ice, or as if she has no consciousness to drive her – _no_.

Every night, it’s the same. Jean calls out to Whiskey – _come on, what are you waiting for?_ – and every night, Whiskey Dawn turns towards the sunlight, and marches out into the horizon without them. Alone.

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 23, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

It’s late – although late is simply a figure of speech when Alaskan days stretch from dull to dreary, and day and night are near interchangeable. Jean has hardly unpacked, his trunk lying open on the floor, his clothes strewn half-in and half-out.

He didn’t bring much with him from Tokyo. He didn’t have much to bring with him, besides the clothes on his back. It’s an eye-opener to how much of his life was tied up in Eren and Atlas and just living long enough to see tomorrow. He’s never allowed himself to put down roots.

He lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his work boots still on his feet. His sweats and tank are crusty with sweat from his Kwoon training earlier, which he has yet to wash off. His skin prickles with the cold where his tank has ridden up across his stomach; he lazily traces the scars of past Drifts across his abdomen with his pointer finger, feeling each like ridges on a map. The quiet hum of commotion exists like a whisper in the walls, and there’s never really peace, either from the people or from the wind.  It’s a stasis that repeats over and over again into infinity – a restless wait that prevails between Kaiju attacks, the only marker he truly has to define the days of the apocalypse.

There’s a soft knock at his door, and he almost grunts out: _Eren, why the fuck are you knocking?_ if not for the brutal reminder of where he is that the constant chill provides. He doesn’t feel like talking to anyone, the lethargy that smothers him an adequate way to waste away the hours until he’s needed again.

“Go away,” he calls out, pathetically. There’s shuffling on the other side of his door.

“It’s Marco,” comes the reply.

Jean almost pulls his lumpy pillow across his face, if only to smother himself. But he just lies there, unmoving, _unable to move_ , and wonders when tired became the only real emotion he can feel.

“Come in,” he mumbles, vaguely aware of the door cracking open, and shutting just as silently as Marco slips into his room, shy and meek. Jean doesn’t have the time for this. He lets his head flop over to the side on his pillow, fixing his flat stare on Marco unapologetically.

“Hi,” Marco says awkwardly. He’s dressed down – finally out of his damned tech overalls, and clad in a leather pilot’s jacket. It’s far too shiny and unblemished. He has books tucked beneath his arm – textbooks and log files, by the looks of things, but a single, dog-eared novel too. Jean doesn’t catch the title.

“Hey,” Jean replies, in a monotone. “What’s the problem?”

“There’s – there’s no problem,” Marco starts, itching the end of his nose. He looks up, suddenly. “Is this a bad time? I know these are your off-hours, but I – I figured I wouldn’t be able to just … _talk_ to you any other time. It’s been – pretty busy, huh?”

“Easiest just to keep your head down and get on with it,” Jean grumbles. Subconsciously, he tugs down the hem of his tank, covering up the criss-cross of his scars. If Marco notices, his eyes don’t follow.

Marco’s smile is tight. His eyes flit around Jean’s empty room, taking in the bare shelves and unused desk. His eyes fall on Jean’s leather jacket, hung up on the wall – the only thing he’s taken care to present – and skip over the logo of Atlas Rogue upon the breast.

“I just – I figured we should probably try to get to know each other,” he says quickly, as if already anticipating the scowl that forms on Jean’s brow. “I know – I know about you, about where you’ve come from, and – I know the facts and the figures. But –”

“If you’re after a bonding exercise, that’s what the Kwoon is for, greenie.”

“It’s _Marco_ ,” he presses firmly, before his tone softens, almost a sigh. “Please. Call me Marco. We’re meant to be partners. We should be friends too. I know you’re – I know you’re not happy with this, but – please. I know you felt that spark. Can we just try? I’ve wanted all my life to be a Jaeger pilot.”

Jean turns to stare at the ceiling again, his chest deflating. His eyes flicker shut for a moment – and he thinks of Eren.

_I need to be a Jaeger pilot! There’s no other way!_

Dammit.

Jean pinches the bridge of his nose, and presses his palm firmly into his forehead.  Futile exercise in stubbornness indeed.

“Marco,” he says, deliberately. “I like you, okay? Don’t get me wrong. You’re a good guy. You know what you’re doing – whatever the hell I might say. You’re easy to work with. But I – listen. Letting people into your head – it won’t end well. It never ends well. Trust me.”

It’s easier to put up walls. Look at what they’re doing all across the Pacific, for Christ's sake. Anti-Kaiju walls are the latest way to outlive the end of the world. Jean knows he survives by keeping people at arm’s length. The only exception got him stranded here.

Jean startles with the metallic scrape of his desk chair against the floor of his cabin. It cauterises him like nails down a blackboard. He pushes up on his elbows, and looks at Marco properly for the first time as he drops down squarely onto the chair, facing Jean. He crosses his legs securely, raising his chin in defiance. He's having none of Jean's excuses. He’s not going anywhere.

Jean finds the surprise that fills him is – _magnetic_. Marco's disregard is _exciting_. 

“Our first trial Drift is tomorrow,” Marco states, “I’m going to be in your head. And you’re going to be in mine. And – and that’s _okay_. If this is going to be partnership, it _needs_ to be okay.”

Jean sits up properly, swinging his legs over the side of his bed. He feels that circadian warmth laving across his skin – the same feeling he had in the Kwoon Room – and it’s alleviating. He feels lighter. Curious. It’s as if his body is willing itself to move.

“There’s bad stuff in my head,” Jean says carefully. “Things in Tokyo didn’t end well for me.”

“I know,” Marco insists, “I know about Atlas. About Shanghai. I’m prepared for it, I swear. You don’t need to keep your distance because of it.”

“You _don’t_ know,” Jean retorts. No-one can know. It’s all in the Drift; it’s deep in his consciousness; it’s a personal bond with Eren that no-one could ever recreate. Memories, instincts, emotions –

“So tell me about it,” Marco interrupts, leaning forward on his chair. “Tell me what I’m going to see when I go inside your head, so I won’t be surprised. Make it easier for me, and it’ll be easier for you, Jean.”

It’s the first time that Marco has used his name aloud, Jean is sure. How have they managed that, he’s less sure – maybe Marco has been calling him something else in training, or just forgoing his name entirely, Jean cannot honestly remember, but –

But he’s sure, because the sound catches on something ragged inside him; the roundness of the vowels and the softness of the tone snags upon the parts of him torn and left in tatters. It's like a light has gone off in Marco's mind again - not a signal flare this time, but a lucid glow, like starlight or the sun about to dip below the horizon, and Jean can _see_ it. It tastes like the best sort of burn – warm and alcoholic – and it trickles down his throat, unsure, uncertain, but irresistible.

“What –” he starts, and then clears his throat. He tries again. This man is going to be his downfall. “What exactly do you want to know?”

The taught line of Marco’s mouth evolves into a smile, coy and demure. The yellow light casts harsh shadows within his dimples.

“Tell me about Eren,” he says softly. It’s not demanding, not invasive, and it just feels – intimate. Jean’s not sure how else to describe it, the sound of Marco’s gentle lilt. His ears have grown used to gruff commands and barking orders and artificial voices. Bloody screams. Dying needs. The thought of a whisper-soft wish is like a pleasure.

“It was broken before we even started.”

 

* * *

 

How does one sum up Eren Jaeger? Jean’s never been quite sure, but once he starts, there are words that tumble relentlessly from his lips, tripping over starts and stumbles, messy and convoluted – but Marco just nods.

Their connection was always violent. Eren carried so much into the Drift that the higher ups never thought he’d be able to find a match, even if everything else was in his favour: he’s the son of the man who pioneered Jaeger technology; he was efficient and unapologetic in the Kwoon; he has a _drive_.

They had met each other at a very strange time, high-noon of the apocalypse, and maybe it was desperation alone that led their minds to meld.

Brittle desperation – that’s what Jean tells to Marco. Their Drift was strong, but fragile. When they were synchronised, Atlas Rogue was unstoppable. But just the slightest jerk – a rogue memory squeezing its way into Eren’s head – would have them slipping out of alignment in the blink of an eye. It was never stable, never enough to be reliable.

“I hate him,” Jean says. He wonders if Marco can possibly know the sort of hate he means – a hate polluted by love and trust and need for another person. “I miss him. I miss it – Atlas. I miss what I had. It was the only thing I – I hate him. He caused it. It’s his fault.”

It was the only thing he’s ever known how to do. He’s lost without it. He’s _cold_ without it.

Jean laughs, dry and bitter, and he thinks the sound surprises Marco at first, who seems physically taken aback by the thought of Jean expressing any emotion other than misery.

“Fuck,” Jean laughs, head in his palm as he rubs his temples. He shakes his hand, his smile derisive, kicking his heels against the baseboard of his bed. “You don’t know, man – you don’t know what it’s like to be so – _angry_ all the damn time. You’re in for a damn treat. You’ll be getting Eren along with me, and I'm already a right fucking mess. It’s the ugliest fucking thing you’ll have ever seen –”

“It’s not,” Marco says swiftly. His smile sympathises, and his eyes are gentle. Jean feels vulnerable beneath them. “It’s not. It won’t be. I was in San Francisco in 2013. My mom moved us – me and all my sisters – because she wanted us to have a better shot than what we had in Peru. I overslept my alarm one day – just by ten minutes – but if I hadn’t, I would’ve been on the Golden Gate bridge when – when Trespasser came. As such, I was in the traffic jam one mile up the rode, but I saw him plough right through it. I don’t think I could ever forget.”

“Were your family okay? Did your mom survive?” Jean asks, before adding under his breath, “I can’t deal with that again.”

“Pneumonia,” Marco admits, his smile rueful. “Mom died the year before the attack. I don’t remember it well. My sisters were all at college out of state.”

“Have you ever seen a Kaiju eat someone else?”

“Yes. Have you?”

Jean thinks of Carla Jaeger, hears blood gurgling in her mouth and filling up her collapsing lungs, sees the jaws of the Kaiju looming above her like a great trough ready to sweep the floor of debris.

“Yeah.”

“Yours or his?”

Jean almost chokes.

“… His.”

“Does it hurt?”

Jean can’t look at him anymore. He feels his walls closing in, feels the sting of a spinal clamp in his back, feels the excruciating tear of the Drift like a splinter beneath his skin that he drives only deeper the longer he roots around for it.

“ _Every fucking day._ ”

He’s said too much.

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 24, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

The Drivesuit Room is the highest point in the Shatterdome. Jean stands in silence in the elevator on the way up – trying to tune out Sasha’s excitement and Marco’s polite nodding at everything she says – and he wonders if they might be above the clouds up here.

Sleep dust is still crusty in his eyes, and there’s a daze inside his head akin to a drunken stupor or a night spent without sleep – he feels like he might be sleepwalking. He tossed and turned all night, and by the time his eyes finally sank closed from pure exhaustion, it was five and his alarm was blaring.

His conversation with Marco had weighed heavily on his mind. He hopes he doesn’t have to add insomnia to his growing list of problems, but he’s not about to put money on it.

The elevator doors open with a hydraulic wheeze into a circular room.  Robotic arms hang from the ceiling, and technicians dressed all in white mill about the computer desks that protrude from the floor. Blue-lit pods are embedded in the walls: circuitry suits, black, second-skins, not dissimilar to wetsuits made of synaptic processor mesh are stored in some, and Drivesuit armour in others.

Jean is already cranky before he steps foot on the Drivesuit Room floor. Some part of him is nervous too, the thought – and weight – of the upcoming Drift lumbering on his mind.

“Alright!” Sasha chimes, clapping her hands together. She’s no more put-together than usual, her long hair scraped up into a messy bun, and her belted overalls already grubby. She’s probably come straight from a roller-tray beneath Whiskey’s underbelly. Jean’s eyes are drawn immediately to her tattoos, their colour dulled by the oil and grime on her forearms.

“In accordance with normal Breach procedure,” she continues, a mile a minute. “We’d usually have you guys in and out of here in seven minutes – yeah, Jean, I know it used to be nine, but they’re clamped down on us and it’s not my place to argue – but today we’re just doing a test to make sure all your equipment is up and running.”

Jean doesn’t have it in him to retort, so he just clamps his mouth shut and follows her obediently as she guides them over to one of the pods in the wall.

“Whiskey works exactly like Atlas and Johtun – her Conn-Pod is her head piece, so once you guys are suited and booted, you can just walk straight in and clamp up, before the Pod is lowered onto the main body for attachment,” Sasha explains. “We’ll get started first with circuitry suits, so I hope you’re not shy, Marco, because you guys are gonna have to strip to get these bad boys on.”

If Marco says anything, Jean ignores it, his eyes on the circuitry suit on the other side of the glass. His fingers come to rest upon the electric scars that mar his ribs and abdomen, the sting of each broken Drift making him flinch. The sharp pain only translates to sharper words.

“Are these new? They look dated.”

Sasha scratches the back of her head, her smile apologetic.

“So – technically yes. They’re new suits, but y’know how PPDC are clamping down on budgets lately and they’re being real narks about everything – basically, the latex is new, but some of the circuitry is pilfered from some old kit we had lying around. But they’re perfectly functional, I wouldn’t let you guys wear them if they weren’t –”

Jean presses the release button on the pod door. When he takes the suit in his hands, it feels stiff and heavy, like neoprene. The lines of gold and conductive wire that cover the suit like an exoskeleton look dull, as if oxidised. Did his Atlas suit always feel this way? Or is he just bogged down by the weight of bitter feelings? He finds he cannot recall.

Beside him, Marco is already peeling off his t-shirt and unbuttoning his cargo pants. They pool around his ankles as he steps free, goosebumps constellating his calves and thighs. From the corner of his eye, Jean notices the pool of freckles in his lower back, collecting as if they’re dripping from his shoulders, a waterfall. He has tan lines – but they’re faded, around his biceps, his neck, and his thighs, just below the hem of his boxer shorts. Jean has fuzzy memories of San Francisco before the first Kaiju attack – but he thinks he recalls yellow beaches and shimmering asphalt.  Every muscle in Marco's body is taut, Jean then notices, drawn to the strain in Marco’s arms even as he unloops his dog tags from over his neck and places them carefully in his pile of clothes, making sure they’re not lost in the folds of his pants.

He’s tall and fit and well-trained. Jean's looks - what red-blooded man wouldn't _look_. Marco's body appears built for this – for his self-professed heroism.

Marco takes his own circuitry suit from the pod with great care, cradling it in his hands as if it were a child. His fingers trace the gold skeleton of wires reverently. It’s been a long time coming, Jean supposes.

He looks back at his own suit in his hands. His fists are clenched around the latex.

“Jean?” Sasha probes. “You good?”

“My Atlas suit was better,” he mutters. Somewhere beside him, as the white-clad technicians rush to zip them up, Jean is aware of Marco scowling.

Jean undresses quickly, tossing all his clothes onto a haphazard pile and wriggling into the circuitry suit as quickly as possible, the air frigid against the skin on his stomach. No-one remarks on his scars, but he feels them all looking. The suit doesn’t feel right – too tight and too loose in different places, even though it clings to his skin exactly as it should.

He looks down at himself, seeing every lump and bone, from his chest to his feet. When he glances up again, Marco is watching him.

Jean feels vulnerable again.

Sasha takes his grouchiness in her stride, breezing over to the next set of pods, where their Drivesuit armour is stored.

“Alright – so, basic armour. We’ve got integrated life support and magnetic interfaces at the spine, feet, and all major limb joints – standard stuff,” she says. “Battle armour also includes a recorder now, which automatically preserves sensory impressions, which should hopefully improve speed of the neural relay.”

There’s something centurion about the armour – maybe it’s just the bronzed colour, or maybe it’s in the shape of the helmet, or maybe it’s the stripe of red paint that crosses from the back of the skull to the edge of the forehead that reminds Jean of a legionary’s horsehair plume.

The suits look good. They match Whiskey, and look like her infantrymen, if she were the legion commander.

“For the record, they’re also bulletproof,” Sasha continues, unlocking the pod doors with a press of her palm. “But if any Kaiju you encounter happens to employ heavy artillery in its arsenal, I vote we just give up now. Still – it’ll protect you from any flying sharps or shrapnel for the most part–”

“Not a Kaiju claw,” Jean interjects. Sasha’s expression sours.

“No. Not a Kaiju claw. I’m sure if we had that sort of technology at our disposal, we might have won this war a lot sooner. And saved a lot of lives in the process.”

Jean pouts, leaning into the pod to grab the helmet of his suit. The balance is good, a lot lighter than he expected.

“What relay gel are you using?” he asks pointedly.

“Lectron II,” Sasha replies with a frown. “Non-chloride.”

“Not Tac? I’d prefer Tac. What about O2 consumption? What’s the tank volume?”

“Decoupled from the motion rig, each suit has oxygen for three minutes without exterior support,” Sasha replies, folding her arms across her chest. “Whiskey is self-replenishing. Obviously. The escape Pods have enough for twenty four hours, before you ask.”

“What’s the polycarbonate doped with?”

“It’s not.”

“Right. And what about self-neutralisation?”

“Kaiju blue vapour won’t touch you, but a larger volume is still a problem. Five minutes, tops, to eat its way through.”

“Doesn’t sound so promising–”

“ _Jean._ ” Marco cuts straight through him, a sword through smoke. Jean’s words are smoke. There’s no substance to any of it. “That’s enough.”

He knows he’s asking too much. Atlas is a rusting bucket compared to Whiskey’s specifications, and Jean knows perfectly well that Lectron II is the relay gel used in all Jaegers post-Mark II, and that three minutes of extra breathing is far more than he expected, and that nothing can really stop the spread of Kaiju Blue once it’s started.

He doesn’t even know why he does it – he can’t just blame it on the lack of sleep. Hell, he can't just blame it on the churned-up mess inside his head. Maybe he’s just wired this way. To be an absolute _ass_.

“Sasha – thank you,” Marco says curtly. The smile returns to Sasha’s face as she brushes Jean’s attitude off with a shrug of her shoulders. “Shall we get suited then?”

Jean doesn’t like all the techs touching him – it’s too much an invasion of his personal space and it makes him antsy. There are a half-dozen hands on him at all times, some human and some robotic, fixing armour panels to his chest, his back, his inner thighs – everywhere.

Sasha approaches him with his spinal clamp in her hands, and something vengeful in her eyes. Jean sighs heavily as he turns around to present his back to her.

“Now, this is going to hurt,” she announces, far too gleefully. “It’s going right into your nerves, so you might feel a little sting –”

Jean yelps. She sniggers. He probably deserves it.

 

* * *

 

The Conn-Pod of Whiskey Jaeger is alight with threads of neon colour. The feedback cradles hang from the ceiling as metal harnesses, and the motion rig – a movable platform for each foot – stems from the gaping hole in the floor. A central control panel bisects the two hemispheres: a multitude of buttons lit up like a string of Christmas lights, and a luminescent screen slowly rotating a 3D holograph of Whiskey’s exterior. A radar beeps overhead.

It’s been nineteen days since Jean last stepped into a Conn-Pod beyond the training simulator. That’s less than three weeks.

But it feels a millennia, and even then, maybe that millennia is not long enough. Part of him will always find illicit thrill in piloting a Jaeger into the heart of the storm, but the rest of him feels sick to his bones. It’s a nausea he’s never felt before, in the past too oft caught up on more violent feelings that came and went like flares of a candle or the winds of a hurricane.

His Drivesuit moves well – he can tell it has not only been made for him, but sculpted for him, not like armour, but more his own personal exoskeleton. His knees and arms move easily, and the weight of his chest pieces don’t weigh down on his shoulders like his Atlas suit always did. The armour upon his legs is light and flexible, but yet his feet still feel heavy.

There’s a fullness in his chest, a bloating, that he usually only associates with vomiting. He hopes it doesn’t come to that.

“Let’s get you guys plugged in, and then we’ll run through all the new features, alright?” Sasha says, slinking into the Conn-Pod behind Jean, side-stepping around his poorly-concealed hesitance. “We’ll try a Drift after that.”

“Can I switch on the HUD?” Jean asks. There feels too much empty space within the cockpit – maybe that’s the issue?

“Sure,” Sasha says, “Control panel. Pretty self-explanatory.”

Jean shuffles over to the screen between the two motion rigs, watching the revolution of Whiskey’s silhouette on the screen. It doesn’t quite feel real, a fever dream of sorts that he might still be living inside the Drift of Atlas Rogue’s Conn-Pod.

Behind him, Jean hears Marco’s boots clunking on the metal floor, followed by his apparent awe.

“Wow,” Marco breathes, and Jean’s stomach churns. He remembers the way he marvelled at Atlas the very first time – above and beyond the admiration he has for Whiskey’s proud stature and her good specs. He sees Whiskey as a machine of war, as a weapon to extent his arm, as a tool of survival. He saw Atlas as a beacon of hope, once. Marco will be seeing Whiskey just the same.

Jean longs for who he was before the Drift, if he can remember who that was at all. A nicer person, probably. A whole person, definitely. Not a miasma of one too many souls in the same weary body.

He stabs a button on the console with more force than necessary, and the HUD erupts into electric life before him, holograms of bright yellow and green and neon blue. Fuel levels, oxygen reserves, a map of the terrain before them: the sense of Deja-vu is like a smack to the face for Jean.

Maybe it’s trauma. God, it is, isn’t it? Eren fucked him over so good and proper that it’s not just the bitter resentment of being replaced by Mikasa, or being forced to leave Atlas behind in the hands of someone else – it’s a scar on his mind, a third-degree of burn caused by all the things they saw and conquered, that hasn’t ever healed, and that he’s only noticed the pain of after he’s come off the adrenaline-high of two years at sea.

“Jean?” Marco prompts, somewhere over his shoulder. He sounds tentative, as if he’s approaching a wild animal who might spit and snarl and bolt.

“You probably want to watch me,” Jean says, flippantly, turning quickly on his heel and stepping onto his motion rig. “It’s not easy the first time. It tends to move around a bit –”

“I have it,” Marco replies. He’s hard to read, the line of his mouth hard and vexed, but his eyes still soft. Always soft. “Thank you.”

“I’m gonna take this side,” Jean blurts, already reaching for his harness as the technicians come pouring in, rushing to his side immediately to fix him into the cradle. “Right hemisphere is the dominant pilot. That’s me.”

Marco says nothing, stepping into the motion rig and clipping in his boots without assistance.

Remember, don't chase the RABIT,” Jean continues, wincing as each frayed nerve in his body readjusts to the overstimulation of a hundred thousand neural impulses flooding through his system and connecting him to the heart of the Jaeger. “Just let them flow, don't latch on. Just … stay in the Drift.”

The Drift is silence. The Drift … is _meant_ to be silence. That’s what the textbooks say. Jean’s found it’s never really been that way.

He looks over at Marco, and he can’t quite hide the desperation in his eyes. He prays for silence, but believes in no Gods to answer that prayer. The only God is the violence of the storm, the grounding pain of the spinal clamp, the hole in the Earth at the bottom of the Pacific.

Marco doesn’t notice him, his eyes fixated on the bright projection of the HUD, himself limp to the hands of the technicians as they clip him into the rig and connect him to his cradle. He jolts as his spinal clamp is aligned, and his nerves become Jean’s nerves, and Whiskey’s nerves. He moves his feet carefully, sliding into each step and feeling how his hips need to move and rotate to lift his knees. He tests his arms: the interface of the cradle is at the spine, but wired extensions run along his forearms, attached to each gauntlet, and feed into the hand controls for Whiskey’s giant fists. Marco curls his armoured fingers around the handle, humbly, the dawning realisation of how much power he holds in his palms evident in the way he sucks in a breath.

Jean pulls down the visor on his helmet, and his world becomes gold-tinted. The sounds of the technicians and the beeping of the Conn-Pod become muffled; the only thing that is clear is the sound of Marco’s breathing in his ear, staccato across their personal comms.

The technicians file out of the Conn-Pod like a conveyor belt, and it feels dangerous again, just him and two thousand tons of steel. The HUD beeps with a metronome; there are no Kaiju on the horizon, but still his veins convulse just beneath his skin, whilst panic and adrenaline link their fingers across his jaw; the muscles in his face twitch.

“Alright,” Sasha says, standing before them, her face coloured with the projection of the HUD, painting stripes of green and blue and distorted figures across her cheeks. Jean adjusts his weight, pushing down into the motion rig; it’s well-oiled and glides beneath him with ease. He rolls his shoulders. There’s no resistance from the cradle.

“Your helmet is about to flood with relay gel,” she says on protocol. “Try not to move too much as it disperses into your suits – it’s just to help the relay of electrical impulses, yadda yadda yadda.”

A yellow-green fluid, viscous and fluorescent begins to fill the vacuum space between the layers of Jean’s visor. The Conn-Pod and HUD disappears behind the rising screen, until Jean is staring at the reflection of his sleep-deprivation on the inside of his visor. The smell is clinical, antiseptic in a way that reminds him all too many unpleasant memories of scratchy hospital beds and the prick of IV drips into his elbow. And it’s claustrophobic, his breath whistling from his lips. Something twitches from the interface at his spine – it must be Marco, their bodies already connected by the throughput of wires and relays.

The gel begins to drain, seeping into his circuitry suit. The electric light cajoles him once again: _are you ready for this?_

He tries to slow his breathing: in and out, in and out, in and out, hoping to calm his mind and compress his thoughts, pushing all the ugly things down into a corner and trampling them flat, so they will not dare to rear their heads inside the Drift. He tries to expand his consciousness, imaging stretching it out as if he were kneading dough to make bread – but it just springs back into a lump with every desperate attempt.

“Are you okay?” Marco asks, and he’s gazing at Jean. “You don’t look okay.”

“So stop _looking_.”

“Remember,” Sasha says, interrupting, “Clears heads equal clear Drifts. A parachute doesn’t work unless it’s open. No place for being modest. Don’t try and hide anything ‘cus you’re embarrassed. You guys are the only ones who’ll see what’s going on in there anyway. Think of it as the best opportunity you’ll ever get for blackmail material on each other.”

She taps them both on the back of the hand in encouragement, and then heads for the door.

“I’ll be up on the bridge!” she calls over her shoulder, “See you boys on the flip-side. And Jean – take it easy. Save yourself the headache.”

The Conn-Pod door whirs shut behind her, and then there’s silence in the cockpit.

The trouble with chronic pain is that it is so easy to become accustomed to. That very first Drift with Eren was absolutely agonising, and they’d lasted thirty seconds and no more before the connection had splintered. It was like a stone in the shoe – the pain had been stabbing at first, every step of Jean’s a limp and a cringe as the sole of his foot was rubbed raw.

But it had become the norm – that rubbing and stabbing could be endured with gritted teeth, and the blood that he had wept had crusted upon his feet as just another thing to overcome. His pain was anger; it was suffering, and grief, and regret, and the byzantine horror of watching your mother die before your eyes. He would remember it was there with the odd flash of pain – debilitating and ostracizing, always upon the brink of the connection or in the recesses of the Ghost Drift – and it would permeate every other thought, constant, persistent, unrelenting. The sickness has stained him so much – his memories of Atlas, his relationship with Eren, his hope to move on. His sense of who he is and _why_ he is.

The _trouble_ with chronic pain is that you would do anything to escape it. And sometimes that anything is alcohol or drugs or depression, and sometimes it’s tearing yourself apart.

Every fibre of Jean’s body is rigid, preparing for the surge. In the face of pain, there are very few heroes.

“Jean?” Marco probes.

“What?” he hisses.

“This is not Atlas.”

“I know.”

“And I’m not Eren.”

“ _I know._ ”

“Prepare for neural handshake,” Sasha says over the comms. “Starting in 15 seconds. Fourteen ... thirteen ... twelve, eleven, ten –”

Jean tries to clear his mind, but everything is tense. He pinpoints upon Eren, and he cannot shake free.

_Eren!_

_I’m going to kill them all!_

_Eren, stop! It’s just a memory! Don’t engage!_

“Pilot-to-pilot connection: protocol sequence,” announces Whiskey’s AI. “Neural handshake initiated.”

With Eren, the Drift was always a tussle, a fight. Forming the neural bridge was like they were wrestling, trying to knock each other to the floor and pin them down with all their weight. Jean braces himself for the first brutal slap of it across his face – but it doesn’t come. There’s no invisible drop.

He slips into the Drift like sleep; lucid spectres appear around him, his mother, his father, his friends from school, from Jaeger Academy, in the Conn-Pod along with him, and he doesn’t even realise who or what they are for a moment, too ready for the sudden screaming of Carla Jaeger to explode behind his temples.

The Conn-Pod fades into infinity, a ghost-like fog exhuming the space around Jean. He makes out figures in the mist, slow and languid: his mother bringing an omelette to the table for his birthday when he was five; the faces of all his classmates from the Academy crowded around the mat in the Kwoon at Tokyo; the wicked grin on Eren’s face when they deployed for the first time from the Shatterdome.

He remembers the first time he sat and watched in awe of Johtun Apostle on the news, dispatching a Category II outside of Vancouver. He jolts with the sting of Eden Spirit going down in a flash of fire and steam. He feels the pride of his and Eren’s first kill – all his potent memories that he has cycled through so many times before, but never stopped to dawdle upon. In the Drift before, it would always seem to fast, a rush towards the main event: the terror, the trauma, the tear in his consciousness as Eren’s mind would come barrelling into his without care to stop.

He hears distant cries for help: his own voice shouting for Eren to stop chasing the RABIT, but it’s far, far away. The sound of Atlas’ creaking bones and blaring PA is muffled by the cloud of other memories.  He catches a glimpse of Carla Jaeger – but it’s just a glimpse. It disintegrates into the white fog that envelopes him, the part of him that is now Eren slipping beneath the surface of a calm sea.

He is so used to the anger and grief and fear Eren brought into the Drift, his body almost recoils in anticipation as he feels the first threads of Marco begin to stretch the gap between their consciences. He expects to be thrown to his feet by a sudden wave, but all Marco does is lap at his feet.

Jean sees Marco then, within the Drift, standing before him, as if he’s waiting. He’s in his overalls – the same that we was wearing that very first day, just as Jean is suddenly in his rain-damp clothes, the cold so very real and icy.

Marco is smiling. It reaches his honey-brown eyes, sunlight across wheat fields – Jean can almost smell the country, can almost hear the wind caressing the slender leaves and stems.

It’s not painful. They touch – beyond physically, the connection of palms something Jean feels within his chest. It’s soft, tentative at first, oddly soothing.

_Hi._

_… Hey._

Marco bristles with an eager energy, a slight sense of fear and apprehension in the way he holds himself. Jean twitches as the first of Marco’s memories begin to trickle across the bridge – Eren’s green eyes are there in a flash, that sense of a caged wild animal staring back at him – but what Marco offers him is nothing short of proud and noble.

Jean hears the sea wind rustle through the bows of palm trees lining the beach of Lima, Peru, as if he were there. He smells the city, tastes the salt upon his tongue.

He feels the concrete rumble beneath his feet as a San Francisco tram comes rattling down the hill towards him, and he steps out of the way into a university classroom, the feel of paper beneath the heel of his palm and a pen between his fingers.

And then he sees himself through Marco’s eyes: in the corridor outside the Kwoon, in the canteen the day Johtun was deployed, between the clash of bō. His eyes are drawn, his face weary, the shadows upon his skin purple and grey. He looks like death.

Next comes his terse remarks, and Jean feels each like a venomous bite – and knows that Marco felt that too. But – but then he feels sorrow, sympathy, compassion. He sees them together in training through Marco’s eyes, and how many times Marco had looked his way without him noticing.

_I wonder if he’s alright._

_He’s clearly suffering._

_Whatever he’s been through must have been bad._

_I want to be his friend._

The Drift changes shape, the haze of white and pale blue taking on the form of his room: his rusty desk, his squeaking chair, his slab-hard bed. He watches himself sprawl across the mattress, limp and lethargic, as Marco slips through the door quietly and carefully. He sees the scars upon his stomach – and they’re so ugly from Marco’s point of view, Jean can hardly look – and then he feels the ache in Marco’s chest, sorrow and longing congealed together into something beautiful.

Marco’s thoughts permeate the wistful daze:  _you’re a real hero._

_Is that you, or the memory?_

_That’s me._

_We’re meant to be silent._

_We’re not talking._

Jean wonders: without the Kaiju, and the war, and the bloodshed, would human kind have been able to develop the technology to meld two souls together? If a man lived to one hundred years old, and loved another person all one hundred of those years, he would not get remotely close to the level of _knowing another person_ that the Drift allows. And it’s not just about knowing – it’s about understanding and assimilating and forgiving. It’s about being.

How can you become another person in the blink of an eye?

How can it really be this … painless?

Jean realises something implicitly: _Marco Bodt should have been his first Drift partner_. Things would’ve been so very different. They meld like lovers; there are no jagged edges threatening to slip out of alignment and catch on the threads of tattered souls.

Something in Jean’s blood blisters. He was never meant to Drift with Eren Jaeger. They could Drift, they did Drift, and they saved people because of it, but – they never _should_ have Drifted. That much anger in just one person was – _a mistake_.

Not when it could have been like this. As easy as breathing.

_It’s not fair._

Eren is here again.

Wisps of the Drift begin to disapparate, the Conn-Pod materialising into view, blue and electric once more. Jean’s vision blurs, his head spinning. He’s not moving, but the dizziness that washes over his is like he’s just been launched out of orbit, the G-force pressing down on him unbearable. His stomach churns, his throat seizing. His connection with Marco trembles, like a string plucked upon a guitar, and he knows it’s Eren’s deft hands that are doing that.

The corners of his eyes burn red. Jean feels Marco wince.

“Okay,” comes Sasha’s voice over the PA. Jean can hear her bright smile, toothy and ecstatic. “Right and left sides both in alignment. Looks like we have a neural handshake, strong and holding. I’m impressed, boys. How’re you both feeling?”

“I’m okay,” Marco starts weakly, “But I think Jean is –”

“I’m fine!” Jean snaps. In the Drift, Marco recoils. In the Conn-Pod, it translates to a tightening of his lips into a flat line. “I’m fine – it’s just – it’s just different to what I’m used to.”

“Hmm – you _are_ slipping a little bit,” Sasha muses, “Are you focusing on something? You need to try and let it go. Your alignment together is good, but your blood pressure keep fluctuating, Jean. You’re passing a lot of information across the neural load.”

“I said, it’s _fine_!” he gripes, “I’m just disoriented. First Drift with a new partner, you know how that goes. Let’s get on with it already.”

_It’s not fair._

_Two and a half years, and it could’ve been like this all that time._

_Why did I have to suffer? What did I do to deserve all that?_

_I was good enough all along, and there was no-one there to tell me._

His body moves on autopilot whilst his mind races at one hundred miles an hour. He moves his legs when Sasha tells him – and Marco moves his, and Whiskey lifts his, a knee to her chest, a thunderous boom when her foot returns to the hangar floor again – and he flexes his arms when instructed, fist into palm, hands splayed out flat, fists curled into a fighting stance against the chest –

His Drift with Marco is smooth and seamless, and they move as one, guiding Whiskey in her warm-up exercises. But there’s a drag, and Jean can feel it – the thought tumbling inside his head rapid-fire and bullet-fast, and Marco is doing his damnedest, not to dodge them, as one might a bullet, but to catch up with all of them. To Jean, it feels like he’s tugging on a dog leash, but the dog is yanking backwards and dragging his paws on the ground.

“Whiskey is lagging,” Jean barks, “Let’s do those again – I want them better.”

“They look fine to us –”

“No. She’s not moving smoothly. There must be a problem with a connection in the neural interface. We’re doing it again.”

 _Jean_ , Marco ushers inside his head, calling him out on the lie. Jean scowls, tightening his fists as they raise Whiskey’s hands in unison. He hears her joints clanking as she matches him hurt for hurt.

 _Jean, stop it,_ Marco pleads. His voice – his thoughts – sounds watery.

The test the artillery, powering up the laser for Whiskey’s cauterising blades, and winding up the plasma caster to practice firing blank clips into the hangar wall. Each blank shot rocks Whiskey on her feet, the swaying getting to Jean’s head.

“The suspension should be dealing with the recoil,” he grits, “It needs to be fixed–”

_Jean._

“You’re making compromises for the increased fire power –”Sasha starts, sounding miffed. Her overwhelming enthusiasm has definitely been dampened, and the severity doesn’t suit her well.

“–and the cool down time is way too long. We’d be a sitting duck out there. It should be halved, at least–”

_Jean, please._

“Whiskey’s cool down time is already the fastest _by far_ of all the Mark IVs –”

“You can tell me that when we empty a clip into the side of one of those fucks, and it cuts us down before we have time to recharge –”

“Jean!”

“Pilots out of alignment,” blurts Whiskey’s AI. “Left hemisphere disconnected –”

Jean whirls around in panic, the cold chill of misalignment like a rake down his back. In his ear, LOCCENT are frantic, hurrying to power down the Pons System before the neural load shifts onto Jean’s shoulders in its entirety. Whiskey splutters into statuesque silence, the whir of her generators snuffed out like a flame. The HUD splutters into darkness, leaving the Conn-Pod illuminated in eerie blue.

_Shit – not again, not again, not again –_

But Marco hasn’t fallen out of alignment. Their Drift hasn’t broken – Marco has removed his helmet, and he’s holding it beneath his arm, but staring hard and furious at Jean.

“Marco–”

“Do you hate living?” he demands.

“W-what?” Jean stammers, “ _Why_?”

“Because it seems you’ve forgotten anything but doing your duty!” Marco exclaims, “It’s all about survival with you!”

“– _what_ –”

“There’s no _heart_ in what you’re doing here. I get that you’re mad because you lost your old partner and your old Jaeger, and I’ve seen what’s going on inside your head, and that you’re hurting, but – you don’t have to be this brutal! It’s not an excuse! There are _people_ here, not just – not just robots! You can’t treat them like this – you can’t treat me like this, not now. _Especially_ not now.”

“Marco, I –”

Marco continues in a whisper.

“Isn’t there still a part of you that fights for something a little more than just making it through to tomorrow?”

Marco’s eyes seem to glisten. Their Drift is broken, but Jean feels his throat still tighten and his eyes begin to burn.

He sighs, heavy and defeated. He unclips his gauntlets from their wires and his boots from the motion rig, and steps free from the cradle. He tugs his helmet from his head, his hair a mess and his forehead shiny with sweat.

He looks long and hard at Marco. Jean feels Marco’s clammy palms, the sweat on the back of his neck, the light-headedness pressing mercilessly on his temples, as if they were all his own symptoms.

Marco Bodt is already in his head. Jean feels unsteady.

“Sometimes tomorrow’s all you’ve got,” he says. He leaves.

 

* * *

 

Sunset does nothing for Whiskey Dawn. The clouds are billowing over the Shatterdome, a storm comes in from across the bay. Jean tastes it in the flat air that seeps like a fog through the high windows and casts Whiskey’s armour in a dull gloss.

The hangar floor far below him bustles with techs running errands and mechanics ferrying parts back and forth between Whiskey’s disassembled plasma caster.

Jean feels terrible – the recharge time was better than anything he could have hoped, better than anything Atlas ever had, and yet they’re still taking it apart on account of his inability to pull himself together.

His legs dangle listlessly over the edge of the gangway, his ass numb from sitting on the steel so long.

Jean knows he’s missed training – he was meant to be in the Kwoon with Levi for muay thai, and then he was supposed to meet Ymir and Krista for a joint exercise between Whiskey and Johtun, and after that he’d had the pile of briefings scattered across his desk to wade through –

He’s been stolen away in the rafters all day, and no-one’s found him. Maybe no-one’s even coming looking for him – not after this morning. He cannot shake the feeling of how _upset_ Marco was, ten times worse that a tearful glance or a berating word could ever be, because Jean has been inside his head.

He can still feel Marco there – he’s not sure if it’s the Ghost Drift, or him just holding onto the tumultuous feelings for the sake of hurting just like he knows how – but it’s a mess of frustration and amazement and connection and –

God. Jean flumps forward onto the rails that cut into his chest and keep him from toppling over the edge of the walkway. He rests his cheek on the cold steel bar, the chill unpleasant, the metal just about frozen enough to stick to his skin.

The Drift – the Drift was like a child. Innocent and curious and undeniably unspoiled by the torture and toil of the world. It was so pure – so calm, so serene, so quiet. He wants to relive it again, over and over until he’s done with this world. And because of that – he knows he has to keep it all at arm’s length. He can’t afford to get addicted.

Jean blinks away salt water in his eyes with a wet huff.

Marco Bodt wants to save people. His nobility is palpable, and Jean – Jean wants to know when that changed for him. When did he degrade from a bright-eyed and far-dreaming trainee pilot, eager to kill Kaiju and win the war, to a bitter and jaded shadow in the water? When did it change from wanting to save humanity, to wanting to save just himself?

The Drift is like looking into the past, and Jean squints at it like it’s the sun. Blinding, but near-beautiful.

But there are storms wild and wet enough to extinguish any fire, and reduce it down to a steaming pile of ashes scattering across the surface of the sea. Sometimes those storms have teeth, emerging from the Breach with roars and ruckus, and sometimes those storms have claws, and it’s not the physical into which they tear.

The simplicity, the purity of the Drift – Jean wants to protect it. Because there’s no way in Hell it can’t end in suffering. All no hoping heroes wind up there in one way or another.

He closes his eyes, and lets himself fall into the Ghost Drift. Eren flits past him, outstretched hands snagging on Jean’s clothes, but he’s not caught – not this time. He’s cradled by a veil of feelings transparent. The fog seeps between the cracks in his armour, drifting across his scars with the feint touch of a tender lover.

_You’re a real hero._

“Jean.”

Jean opens his eyes a crack. Marco stands before him on the gangway, hand on the rail and paused mid-step. He seems surprised, but there’s exhaustion in the lines on his face. He seems to have aged years in just hours.

“Oh,” Jean murmurs, “H-hey.”

“I didn’t know you were – I didn’t know anyone else came up here.”

“Sorry,” Jean sniffs. He pulls his feet back up on the gangway, and prepares to haul his carcass upright. “Sasha told me ‘bout it. Doesn’t work so well at sunset. I’ll – I’ll get going. Didn’t mean to intrude on your –”

“Don’t go.”

Jean stares at him blankly.

“I’ve … been an asshole,” he reasons slowly, as if it explains every reason he needs to leave.

Marco’s hand clamps over Jean’s shoulder, pushing him back down onto the gangway. Marco crouches down beside him, swinging his own legs over the edge, and matching Jean muscle for muscle in how he leans against the railings.

“Yep,” Marco says simply. “You really are.”

The prideful part of Jean wants to explain haughtily that he was disoriented – confused, taken aback by the serenity of the Drift, conflicted about how much better Whiskey fairs to his time in Atlas already – and that he  was taking out his bad mood on anyone he could reach.

But it’s a reason, not an excuse. He feels excuses are obsolete when you’ve been in the Drift with someone. Lying becomes a dead practice.

Jean rests his forehead against the railings and screws his eyes shut tightly, the last thing he sees being Whiskey’s visor staring straight back at him.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “I’m just … sorry.”

Marco doesn’t say anything for a while – he looks ahead, his eyes cast across Whiskey’s helmet, admiring all her centurion glory as he kicks his legs back and forth absently. He doesn’t seem cross – Jean’s not how he can tell, but he can tell. Marco’s not angry – not in a fiery, tempestuous way, anyway – and Jean’s caught between relief and disappointment.

Maybe the silence prevails for a good five minutes – Jean doesn’t count, feeling drowsy as his breaths slow to match the rise and fall of Marco’s own. His eyelids ache, longing to flutter closed into some deep, never waking sleep.

“I was really excited to be your partner,” he says at last. “Atlas Rogue was my favourite. There was always something about her that – that felt like she was fighting for something more than glory, more than fame, more than just … doing the right thing. I watched your Vladivostok drop on the television, you know? I thought you were amazing.”

“’M sorry to disappoint.”

Marco huffs.

“You’re human, not a robot,” he says, “Humans can’t be fixed with a welding gun and a spanner. All they can do is take responsibility for their actions. That’s the one thing a Jaeger can’t do.”

“Do you regret signing up?”

“No.” Marco answers without pause for thought. “No, never.” And then he adds, “I always knew who you were. I always knew you were – an _ass_. But I signed up for the Mark IV programme in the hope of … in the hope of getting to go on assist with you. Because – because I knew you were brave and resilient and a good leader. I watched all your TV spots on the news – you can see it in your eyes, Jean. Maybe you try and conceal it, or hide it, or whatever, but … it’s all there. I don’t need the Drift to know that.”

Jean snorts dryly, a scoff dying in his throat. He turns his head to look up at Marco. The flat dusk light plays in pale shadows across his skin, and makes his eyes seem far away.

“Don’t …” Marco starts carefully, “I don’t want you to run away from what you have. You have a job to do, you have a skillset that we need, you have – you still have a purpose in the world. People need you. You can’t give up yet.”

“You think I’m giving up?” Jean asks, “Was that what was inside my head?”

“Yes,” Marco replies, “Yes. I saw Atlas. I saw Carla Jaeger, and Mikasa, and Eren. I felt the hurt you felt when you lost them. I felt the pain of the Drift breaking. I know how it feels to see each and every Kaiju that comes through the Breach as just another wave in a never ending stream – but I also saw beautiful things. Hopeful things. And those memories were the brightest.”

Something moves within Jean – a terrainial shift, tectonic plates breaking apart and folding back together anew. For a moment, it’s like he can feel the spinning of the Earth on its axis within the palm of his hand.

Marco Bodt is moving at that very same velocity.

“I think you’re going to be a great pilot,” Jean murmurs, “And a great partner.”

The frank and candid _grin_ that blooms upon Marco’s face is magical – and possibly better than any perfect Drift. Jean’s breath stutters for a very real moment.

“I have an idea,” Marco announces then, pinkened colour saturating his cheeks. He touches his nose again – it must be a thing he does when he’s shy or embarrassed. “It’s not exactly … _allowed_ , per say, but I thought – if we were normal. If you and me, if we’d met on the street in downtown San Francisco, or we’d met each other in a bar, or found each other at a club and by some miracle I’d managed to score your number – we’d talk to get to know each other. Facebook message, WhatsApp once we’d gotten a bit closer, exchanging text messages maybe. We don’t have that luxury anymore. We don’t have time – _we have the Drift_ – to make that connection. But –”

There’s something about the way the flush spreads all the way down to Marco’s throat that makes Jean … feel very _attached_ to him. It’s probably a given – there’s nothing more intimate than the Drift, so he wouldn’t deign to call them strangers in any sense of the word – but it’s still surprising. Jean’s not sure when the last time he actively felt like he wanted to spend time with another person, and not be exhausted by it.

“But – we could still make this work in our own time,” Marco continues, “In – in the K-Lab, I saw that Professor Hanji has some old Pons System tech, and I thought maybe – I thought they wouldn’t notice if it was borrowed for an hour or two. So we could Drift again on our own terms. No LOCCENT, no AI, no Jaeger – just us. Getting to know each other.”

 

* * *

 

Professor Hanji Zoe is a scatterbrain, and it’s all too easy for Marco to saunter into the K-Lab and procure an old Pons System from the pile of uncatalogued tech that swamps every available surface and every square inch of floor. If Hanji’s assistant – a scared, flighty looking scientist, named Moblit, who spends his days running around like a headless chicken picking up discarded Kaiju entrails – notices them sneaking around, he says nothing, if Jean’s daring glare is anything to go by.

Jean leads the way back to his room, high on the feeling of being in school again and playing hooky with a boy he liked, sneaking away from a game and beneath the bleachers to make out. It’s not exactly the same – but the thrill is real, especially when Marco pulls him back against a wall as Marshal Smith and Fightmaster Levi come marching down the corridor, caught in pressing conversation.

When Jean falls back upon the door of his cabin, he finds breathy laughter in his throat. Marco is standing in his room and grinning, shaking the old Pons System free of its tattered canvas bag and onto Jean’s desk. The pile of paper briefings are pushed out of the way, forgotten.

The Pons Systems from the Glory Days take on the form of two neural cages – a far cry from the integrated system stored within their Drivesuit helmets – with sensor pads that suction onto the temples to receive and deliver electrical impulses. A bundle of tangled wires links the two systems together via a box generator.

They settle on Jean’s bed, backs against the wall, with the generator between them. There’s no pressure, no scrutiny, no two thousand tonne weight upon their arms and legs. Just them.

“See you in the Drift,” Marco smiles, tender. Jean’s heart aches. He nods.

They lose hours in the Drift, no sense of time nor place to spoil the resonance. They find each other in an instance, no searching, no collision of two trucks hurtling towards each other at a hundred miles an hour, just a quiet sense of: _oh, there you are. I’ve been looking for you for a very long time._

Jean’s mind has never been more open. He feels Marco’s tentative touch, and welcomes him, stepping back to let his memories be probed. Marco is gentle with them, handling them as if they were precious. He learns to love Jean’s mother, feels the sting of seeing Jean’s parents kiss the day his father decided to join the Kaiju resistance forces. He watches in silence at Jean’s first hand-hold, first kiss, first _time_. Jean doesn’t feel embarrassed, his modesty reflex swallowed down and suffocated.

In return, he relishes in every emotion Marco has felt – and Marco feels emotion richly. He feels the staunch determination in his soul when he moved from Lima to San Francisco, that burning drive to prove himself, to make a success of himself, to do good by others. He feels mortification of catching one of his older sisters with her boyfriend; he feels the chilling horror of the Golden Gate bridge crumbling into rubble, like something out of a blockbuster movie that can’t possibly be real; he feels the admiration and gated envy as he watches fellow Rangers upon the television: Marshal Smith and Fightmaster Levi and their unbeatable track record; the nationwide pride of seeing the daughter of the President of the United States sacrifice her safety to the serve of her nation; and the implicit understanding in seeing Jean sit silently to the side of his more boisterous co-pilot, mulling over hurricane thoughts.

They share Eren together. They save him for last, after all else is said and done, and Jean’s hand on that metaphysical door trembles more than he would ever admit aloud – but in the Drift, Marco’s hand covers his, and they turn the doorknob as one.

The glow of Shanghai sets the sky on fire in the distance. They’re fifty kilometres out again, and the tides are rough and battering, and the shrill screams of Shrieker are shattering their ear-drums. Eren is yelling, screaming hoarse with blood-rage, and Jean is holding Atlas Rogue together with shaking bones and tearing muscles. He can feel the threads of the Drift – his and Eren’s – fraying, a ladder in the fabric of their souls, and he cannot stop it.

A blow to his chest winds him – it’s his transfer orders, handed to him by Eren, who transforms into Mikasa, who transforms into Atlas Rogue herself. It’s the feeling of uselessness, the _we don’t need you for this anymore_. It’s the bitter sting of winter’s chill, the tasteless food, the howling gales outside the Shatterdome doors, the loneliness.

 _I need you_ , Marco says, and Jean’s not sure if they’re words for him, or just a passive thought passing by – but it matters. Around him, the Drift begins to fade, the memories dissipating, the dream awakening.

Jean blinks slowly, the artificial lights of his room a headache as they come into focus once more. Reality is grey, but somehow a little more hopeful than when he went to sleep.

Marco stirs beside him, his head lolling onto his shoulder as he wakes. Jean meets his eyes without reservation when he opens them. The things that are exchanged transcend words; whilst the Pons System is still connected to their temples, they are connected.

Marco yawns. Jean yawns too. They both laugh.

Carefully, Marco peels the suction cups from his forehead, easing out of the headgear. The bond fizzles out like a firework, but Jean can still smell the smoke, woody and earthy, as he remove his gear too.

“I like Drifting with you,” Jean can’t refrain from admitting. He feels heat creeping up his neck. “It’s nice. Nicer than I thought it could ever be.”

“I’m glad I confronted you in the hallway that day,” Marco smiles, before adding cheekily, “I like Drifting with you too, Jean. Maybe we could do it again sometime in the future?”

Jean snorts, reaching out to shove Marco roughly in the shoulder. Marco chuckles, and warmth rises in Jean’s chest. He feels emboldened.

“Y’know, Marco …” he starts, “I’ve spent a long time living in the moment. I guess – it’s gonna always be a hard thing for me to escape. I never really thought … about the future before.”

“Maybe it’s time,” Marco says softly. “Maybe it’s not about keeping yourself safe. Maybe surviving just isn’t enough anymore.  We’re trying to win the war. Whiskey Dawn and you and me – we’re going to save the world.”

Jean cracks a smile, ducking his head as he huffs a breathy laugh. Somewhere distant, he hears Eren, and somewhere closer, he begins to let him go.

 “You’re a God-damn hero, Marco Bodt.”

Marco shrugs.

“So are you.”

_So am I._

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 25, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

The first thing Jean does when he wakes the next day is apologise to Sasha. He finds her in the canteen at breakfast, chatting brightly with Johtun’s engineer, Connie, but she turns to glare at Jean as he approaches tentatively with his tray.

“I’m sorry,” he says without pause. “I’ve been a real ass.”

She laughs like it’s nothing, and slaps him on the shoulders in forgiveness.  Connie teases him for all his whining about Whiskey’s performance, but it’s merciful, and Jean finds himself laughing at his own indiscretions.

Ymir and Krista join them soon after, a hive of energy and whip-sharp remarks, and Jean can’t help but think: _these people are good people. They are a team. My team._

The people he’s going to survive with. The people he’s going to win with.

 

* * *

 

Marco and Jean’s second Drift in Whiskey Dawn is superior in every way imaginable. There are a few snarky remarks on Jean’s part – he can’t help it; it is who he is, after all – but Sasha has none of it, telling him with a laugh to _suck it the Hell up_. Marco sniggers, so it’s all Jean can do to roll his eyes and look at Marco knowingly.

They glide into the Drift as if they were four-year veterans, the transition seamless and the alignment perfect. Sasha says she’s never seen a neural connection so solid; Jean feels proud, his ego revelling in the attention.

Whiskey Dawn moves as an extension of them on every level. Jean can feel the bristle of power within her core, bursting with eager energy, impatient to get out in the field. In his mind, she’s alive, and she’s a hero, driven by the need to do good and just. She’s unafraid to go charging into the fold, ready to put herself on the front-line, but not as a self-sacrifice – _as a thing that must be done_. She has the calibre of a leader, someone to whom the people look for guidance and for strength, and Jean and Marco are her messengers.

They train with Johtun Apostle, out in the Cook Inlet, powering through the mudflats and surging through the icy water. The weight of Johtun Apostle using Whiskey’s shoulder as a springboard becomes second nature, and the subsequent laughter as Ymir overshoots and lands with an ungainly splash and flail of reinforced steel limbs, is a pleasure Jean never once imagined before. Whiskey’s blades sear through the tides in great clouds of steam that rise up into the air to be caught in the highways of wind currents that soar over the Alaskan ridges.  He feels his old habits long to go with them.

When Eren appears in his head, it’s less and less the bad. It becomes: _oh, Eren liked the song_ , when Ymir decides they cannot train in silence, and _Marco dodged that when Eren would’ve tripped_ , when they’re sparring, and it’s a good thing.

Anchorage no longer freezes his insides; he has assimilated into the environment, his bones the rock along the harbour shore, and his blood the driving sea upon the beach, and the rekindled fire he’s relearning how to fuel, the power of the Alaskan storms overhead. He is the Earth, and it is his, all the way down to the core, and all the way up to the sky.

That’s what Marco says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Songs I recommend listening to whilst reading this fic: Faithfully (Journey); Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (U2), Lean On Me (Bill Withers), Carry On My Wayward Son (Kansas). I was on a 70s/80s bender when I wrote this.


	3. the quick and sudden terror of exploding bombs

**APRIL 27, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

The weeks pass quickly, and the Alaskan snowfields begin to melt with the month of May upon the horizon. There have been no Kaiju breaches since Johtun’s deployment to Hawaii, and the base exists on a brink, everyone poised upon the starting block, holding onto the edge with dear life to stop themselves tumbling into the water before the gun is fired.

Jean is sitting in the canteen, scraping the last remnants of salmon risotto from his plate with the side of his fork. He and Marco haven’t been in a Drift for almost a week, and it’s begun to gnaw at him, like an itch he cannot scratch. Ymir and Connie are in their own little world on the other side of the table, hotly debating the finer points of whether Godzilla would beat a Category III Kaiju or not, so Jean entertains himself with thoughts of asking Marco if he wants to steal Hanji’s Pons System again.

They’ve done it a few times since that first day – and Jean thinks it genuinely helps, he really does. Excluding bad thoughts becomes easier when they’re in the Conn-Pod, and they achieve neural bridging faster than any other pair in the history of Jaeger teams.

But he likes it for selfish reasons too. Stealing away into the quiet of his cabin with Marco, exploring the corners of the Drift together, and maybe splitting a few beers afterwards whilst they remain just a little too close for friends (but not close enough for Rangers) on top of Jean’s covers – that’s good. It leaves him with a tingle in his gut he had long forgotten, left behind in the dream of suburban life from years ago.

Love is inevitable between Drifting partners, and Jean is more than aware of that. It’s not always love in a romantic sense – although sometimes it does manifest that way, as Jean has seen between Ymir and Krista – often the love between siblings, or between parent and child, or between old friends or combat veterans. Sometimes it just has no label, and it’s a love born out of the intimacy that can only come from being inside another person’s head.

Jean loved Eren in that way – and in a difficult way. It was the sort of love that would have either of them following each other into Hell without even having to ask.  It was also the sort of love that scorched them both, burning hot and fast and erratic.

Jean probably loves Marco – but he also _likes_ him too, and in his head that feels like something that must be differentiated. If he had more time – more time, and less _dying_ – maybe he’d figure out what to do with that knowledge. But he doesn’t.

Then again – when they’re in the Drift together, it’s not as if he needs to voice these things for them to be known.

Jean stirs from his thoughts with a familiar hand pressing between his shoulder blades. Touches are second nature between them now, a humble substitution for the intimacy of the Drift. He doesn’t even need to look up to know who it is.

“Mornin’,” Jean mumbles around his fork, sliding up on the bench to make space beside him. “Sleep good? We’ve got muay thai this morning – hope you’re ready for me to kick your ass. Again.”

“Please,” Marco snorts, easing into Jean’s side. He’s wearing cargo pants, a black t-shirt tucked into his belt. Jean appreciates it. He also appreciates the faint smell of motor oil clinging to Marco’s skin – although admittedly in a slightly different way. He was probably up late tinkering again – his desk in his cabin is drowning under spare parts and loose screws. Jean has taken to teasing him about giving up his J-Tech career too soon. “The score is 29-32 to you. It’s hardly an _again_ –”

He’s interrupted by a loud shout from somewhere within the canteen, amidst the tables full of techs and scientists. Jean looks up, frowns, and is about to tuck his head again, when the person shouts again, and he realises it’s Sasha, having come hurtling through the doors.

“Someone put the news on! Category III just came through the Breach! Tokyo-bound!”

Jean drops his fork. He’s been waiting for this.

“Shiiiiit,” Ymir drawls, setting down her own cutlery and spinning around on the bench to face the big screens on the wall as they flicker into life. “Your old stomping ground, Jean. Atlas Rogue 2.0 gets her first drop, huh?”

Tension slinks into Jean’s body, vitrifying his muscles and clamping down on his stomach. Reporting helicopters circle somewhere over the Philippine Sea, following the shadow of a Kaiju as it skulks through the water, ominous and threatening. It looks reptilian – a long, winding tail, a stocky body, and a crocodilian jaw – but the footage changes in a blink to the Shatterdome just south of Tokyo, and the triumphant figure of Atlas Rogue powering through the waves.

“Why isn’t Wasp on assist?” Jean hears Ymir complain, clearly more focused on the words scrolling across the screen. “Hong Kong is way closer than Sydney, even by airlift – why the Hell is Howler Foxtrot on back-up? They’ll be lucky if he doesn’t fall apart on them!”

“I thought Mike and Nanaba had been decommissioned?” Krista queries, “Last I heard, Sydney was negotiating with the US for the first of the Mark Vs.”

“Man – a rookie team in Atlas and a half-working Foxtrot,” Connie muses, “Who’s dumbass idea was this? I bet Wasp is just rubbing her hands already. She’ll be bailing them both out in no time–”

“Jean?”

Jean drags his eyes away from the screen at the sound of his name on Marco’s lips.

“You don’t have to watch this,” he says sternly, deliberately not looking at the screen as Atlas Rogue closes in on the Kaiju signature with devastating speed. Jean sees how she runs – it’s faster, defter, sleeker than he knows. It must be Mikasa. Their bond must be –

“Do you want to go warm up for training?” Marco presses again. “This will be over really quickly. There’s no need to worry about Howler and Atlas –”

Jean nods, his jaw so tight he cannot form words.

As they leave the canteen, Atlas Rogue is two hundred metres from the drop point.

 

* * *

 

Marco receives a message on his pager twenty minutes after they find much needed solitude in the Kwoon Room. He’s holding Jean’s feet down as he does sit-ups, each one bringing their noses closer together and mingling their breaths – and switches to one hand across Jean’s toes when he hears the beep.

Marco freezes. Jean is struck with the backhanded blow of panic, and he scrambles to Marco’s side in an instant to see what he has read.

 _We’ve lost Howler Foxtrot_ , says Krista. _I hope Jean is okay._

Jean finds his breath again, but only for a moment. A hundred miles an hour, ricocheting around his head is: _it wasn’t Atlas, it wasn’t Atlas, it wasn’t Atlas_ – but his heart gags in his throat as Marco hurries to the screen mounted on the Kwoon Room wall and switches it on.

The simpering blue carcass of a Kaiju lies centre screen, a steaming lump of mangled flesh and leaking blood, spewing toxic vapour into the air. Atlas Rogue is knee-deep in the water, her right shoulder dislocated from its socket and hanging suspended by a tangle of wires. In her grasp lies the upper half of Howler Foxtrot – without her Conn-Pod. Without her pilots. She’s only half a corpse.

Atlas Rogue doesn’t move.

The Ghost Drift shrieks in pain. Jean feels Eren crying across the thousands of miles, even now. And now, Marco feels it too. It’s the first time he’s ever really felt their connection beyond a memory. This is live, and it’s very real.

“Marco –” he starts, crawling to his feet with a desperate hand already outstretched. “Hey, Marco–”

“Foxtrot –”

Jean has seen countless Jaegers fall across the years; Eden Spirit and Foxtrot are just two of many. He knows Marco has seen them too, but – but seeing the first Jaeger fall when _you’re a pilot_ – that’s different, Jean knows.

You know that could’ve been you. Could’ve been that person inside the Conn-Pod you have come to love.

Marco remains rooted to the spot in front of the television screen. His fists clench and unclench at his sides, a habit of Jean’s he has adopted. Jean had never met the Foxtrot pilots – but he sees them inside his head in that instance, both of them tall and lithe and blonde and _drenched_ in Marco’s grief. Marco helped build Foxtrot’s nuclear vortex turbine. Jean’s not sure how he knows this, but he does. Marco seems to tell him without the need for words.

“I’ve – I’m – they’re _gone_.”

The fear that Jean knows well – the selfish fear that tomorrow will be the last day he might ever see – ripples up Marco’s spine, and becomes his burden too. It cramps just the same as it ever did.

 

* * *

 

**JUNE 8, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

It happens in the only way it ever could – without warning. They’ve been waiting for this day for months now, blindly feeling around in the dark for something they know they fear.

Their first drop in Whiskey Dawn.

Jean is asleep when the sirens start to blare, so he awakes with a sickening jerk and his heart stops for a puncturing moment. Red lights flash across his room, strobe and disorienting, and for a second, it doesn’t hit him. He slumps forward in his bed with his head in his hands and his legs made of lead, and forgets where he is or what he has to do. He feels sick in his stomach, a bloating nausea, and his mouth goes dry as his ears ring and the blood in his temple beats a relentless rhythm in the dark.

Light bursts into his room with the door flying open – and then it becomes all too real, and not another drill. Marco is there, flustered and wind-swept, his cheeks flushed and his breaths coming hard. He holds the doorknob with a white fist.

“Jean –”

It’s like riding a bike. He will never be able to truly forget (and perhaps that is a curse he has bargained for with the Devil).

“Marco, let’s go.”

 

* * *

 

“Johtun Apostle, report to Bay 01, level A-67. Whiskey Dawn, report to Bay 02, level A-67. Kaiju. Code name: Smiler. Category III. 9300 metric tons.”

 _Did there ever used to be a thrill in this?_ Jean can’t honestly remember, blood pumping in his ears as he and Marco run through the labyrinth maze of the Shatterdome’s underbelly. His lungs sting, the air too cold, and the people they pass in a blur fall in and out of focus, his eyes not yet caught up from sleep.

It’s late – or earlier, however you call it. The sun is not yet up. People are sticking their heads from their doorways, half-asleep still, woken rudely by the alarms.

Sasha greets them at the Drivesuit Room, clad in a loose pair of sweats and a white t-shirt hanging from her bare shoulder. She has her cargo jacket draped across her shoulders, and her work boots hastily pulled onto her feet. Her characteristic smile missing.

“Alright – seven minutes,” she says, “Let’s do this, boys. All that practice better have not been for nothing.”

 

* * *

 

Marco rolls to a stop with his helmet in his hands. Jean doesn’t notice immediately – the whirl in his gut a distraction, and the flurry of techs locking down his Drivesuit armour a shield. His head is almost empty – it’s not a clarity, but the adrenaline-fuelled nothingness that always comes before a drop. He’s not _him_ ; he’s just a body, a cog in the great machine of war.

“Marco–” comes Sasha’s voice, visibly concerned, “What’s the matter? Is something wrong with your suit?”

Jean’s head snaps ‘round, looking for Marco like a hypnotic jerk, instinctual, uncontrollable. Fear is ripe within the room; Jean tastes its distinct, acid flavour on his tongue. He lets the techs clip his spinal clamp into place, he hisses with the pain, and then he’s at Marco’s side in all of three strides.

Jean places his gold hand upon Marco’s shoulder, and would squeeze if he thought Marco would feel it through his armour. Marco’s reflection stares back at him from his helmet visor – and Jean knows panic.

“Marco. We don’t have much time,” he says, his voice low.

“I can’t move,” Marco replies breathlessly, “I can’t – my legs are frozen. I can’t feel my fingers.”

For all his competence, for all his bravery, for all his do-good words, Marco Bodt is only human. No amount of endless training can truly prepare someone for the feeling of standing of the edge of a chasm and being told they must jump.

“You’re scared.”

“I didn’t think I would be, I – _we practiced so much_.”               

“Doesn’t matter. This is your first drop. You should be scared.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m fucking _terrified_ ,” Jean admits candidly. He feels the eyes of all the technicians on their backs, and hears the War Clock ticking over inside his head: _clunk, clunk, clunk_. “But fear keeps us alive. I’d be pretty damn worried if you weren’t scared. We could die out there. That’s real.”

“I don’t want to die,” Marco whispers. “I keep thinking about Foxtrot. I didn’t realise what it meant, but now I – I don’t want _us_ to die.”

“The world needs you, Marco Bodt,” Jean says, with a smile. It’s terse, but he knows it matters. He steps in front of Marco, and covers his trembling hands upon his helmet with his own. “What ever happened to the hero complex of yours?”

 

* * *

 

**JUNE 8, 2018. 300KM WEST OF SEATTLE, PACIFIC OCEAN.**

“Smiler,” Ymir chortles, “What the fuck next are they gonna calls these things – _Mickey fucking Mouse_?”

Jean has his eyes closed, but he still lets slip a derisive snort when he hears her complaining in his ear. He doesn’t want to look at the terrain map flashing upon the HUD – they’re too high-up in the air and the rocking of the airlift helicopters are already giving him motion sickness. He doesn’t usually want to feel the seabed beneath his feet, but he can make an exception – even in the face of a Kaiju threat.

“Kill us a Kaiju, and maybe they’ll let you name the next one, Ymir,” Connie snorts over the comms.

“I’m gonna call it Big Ugly Fucker,” Ymir announces proudly, “And the one after that will be Big Ugly Fucker’s Brother. Then his Sister.”

“And you’ll continue until you run out of immediate family members, I presume?” Krista counters. “I hope he doesn’t have that many siblings.”

“It’ll be a great family reunion,” Ymir barks, “In Hell! Ha!”

“I hope you get eaten by a Kaiju,” Connie mutters. “T-minus two minutes until drop. Everyone doing alright? Whiskey, you guys are being kinda quiet. All good?”

“Oi, Connie,” Sasha squawks, “They’re in the zone, don’t bother them! Just because you’re jealous my boys are more professional that your girls–”

“If you wanna put money on that, babe–”

“We’re okay,” Marco announces, and Jean doesn’t think the comms are sensitive enough to pick up the shake in his voice. “As much as I do appreciate you trying to flirt with your wife, Connie.”

“Girlfriend. Girlfriend!” Connie exclaims. “I haven’t popped the question yet, so don’t spoil it–!”

“Marshal Smith on deck,” comes the voice of some LOCCENT tech, silencing Connie and Sasha’s quips. The tension is palpable, the creak of the Jaegers suspended a hundred feet in the air, and the _whop whop whop_ of helicopters blades muffled by steel and iron.

“Rangers. This is Marshal Erwin Smith,” comes the Marshal’s the booming voice, calm and collected. “Your orders are to hold the mouth of the Puget Sound. Johtun will be calling the shots, Whiskey, you are on assist. Do not let the Kaiju breech. You are protecting the lives of fifteen million citizens. Copy?”

“Johtun, copy,” says Krista, “You can count on us, sir.”

“Whiskey, copy,” parrots Jean, “We’ll do our best.”

“I’m counting on it, Rangers,” says Marshal Smith, “Do not take any unnecessary risks.”

The sea stretches out before them, the Pacific Northwest unusually calm for the early whispers of storm season. Jean wonders if the sky is cloudless, if they could see the moon if they went up and out through Whiskey’s cranial hatch. Would it paint a path of adularescent light towards their destination? 

They will have to settle for the neon light of the HUD. The blue glow is striking against the gold of their Drivesuits, but the electricity does little for the nervous, rippling energy inside the Conn Pod. Both of them feel it – a sense of synchronicity they haven’t felt before, entwined in expectation and fear. Jean feels skittish, as if he’s not quite sure what his hands might do when they find the Earth again. He curls his fingers around his hand controls to stop his fingers shaking.

Does he remember how to fight? How do you throw a punch, land a kick? How do you kill an unimaginable monster?

What if he can’t do it without Eren? What if Marco freezes up mid-brawl, like so many other rookie pilots have in the past, and they become another pile of scrap metal at the bottom of the ocean? What if he fucks it all up again–

“Prepare for drop,” says LOCCENT, “Rangers, please brace yourself for landing. Kaiju signal one hundred meters ahead, due south. Please refer to your radars.”

Jean doesn’t realise they’re falling – that the helicopter has dropped them loose – until Marco adopts a wide-legged stance and raises his fists, and Jean does the same. Whiskey Dawn lands in the ocean with a mighty splash, seafoam rushes up and over her head in a gush of white froth.

“In-coming! On your left!” Ymir calls as Johtun cannonballs into the sea to their port side. The water is high on Whiskey, lapping at her knees, but it’s higher still on the smaller Johtun, submerged half-way up the Jaeger’s thighs.

“Alright,” she then says, and there’s a joviality in her tone that feels equally familiar – Eren – and equally foreign – _also Eren_. Jean’s been here a dozen times before, and his blood wants to boil. It’s a knee-jerk reaction: the need to charge head first into the fray like a bull in a china shop. “Whiskey, you’re staying on guard. I don’t want you stepping in unless we’re literally screaming for help – you got that? Don’t butt in.”

“There are two of us, and one of it,” Jean counters hotly. “You’re going in vulnerable, Ymir! Let us run point!”

“No,” Ymir hisses, “You stay back. Get behind it, between it at the coastline. You don’t move until we call you.”

“Ymir–!”

“Jean,” comes Krista’s voice, serene and yet authoritative. “With all due respect, you haven’t been active since Shanghai, and that ended badly for you. And Marco is a rookie – so let’s just take it easy. If we need you, we know we can rely on you. Don’t worry. But we have to work together, and Johtun’s saws will be best suited for this one.”

“Fifty metres,” says LOCCENT. “Rangers prepare to engage. The target is large but mobile. We expect it to be quick.”

The sea before them swell, as if a whirlpool was opening amidst the waves, its gravity too much for the lapping of the tide. The radar in the Conn-Pod beeps erratically, the shadow of a target come to a stand-still ahead of them.

Jean tries to focus on the calm. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in–

The Kaiju emerges from the water like a phantom, an amorphous shape in the dark. As it unfurls its long and gangly legs, spindly like the limbs of a spider, unnerving and unnatural, it rears its head to the sky and rages – Marco stills, the breath catching in his throat.

 _Oh God_ , Marco thinks.

 _Hold on_ , Jean replies. And then he thinks, _I hate that sound._

_Do they all scream like that?_

_Yeah._

The Kaiju’s lower its head and locks onto the sight of the two Jaegers waiting in the water for it – and its face is almost all teeth, its mouth wide and grinning and _horrifying_.

_Smiler, indeed._

“That’s one ugly fucker!” Ymir crows across the comms bravely, as Johtun pounds one fist into the flat of its other palm, gloatingly. “Our saws will cut nicely through those arms though, so that’s what we target. We can get a good scramble up its back and take it down from above.”

“Whiskey, you’re the distraction,” Krista continues, their minds melded into one, “Stay out here and keeps its focus as we circle around and run in. It won’t be as fast as us. Light up your plasma caster and shoot it in the chest.”

“R-roger that,” says Marco, “Left hemisphere plasma caster engaging. Powering up –”

“Time to get fucking wrecked,” Ymir snarls.

Marco extends his arm, the hand control within his grasp, and a circle of light envelops his gauntlet, yellow and white and pink. Whiskey’s consciousness pulsates through him – through them both.

“Plasma caster engaged,” says the AI. “Fire at will.”

Whiskey raises her left arm with a mighty whir, and the plasma caster lights up the dark with a flare, the pulse of energy cleaving the air and carving into the Kaiju’s chest with a hiss of bubbling skin and a screech of pain. The Kaiju reels away from the hit, and Johtun launches into a sprint towards its blind spot, silver and chrome parting the shallow sea.

“Weapon recharged,” says the AI. “Fire at will.”

 _Should we fire again?_ Marco thinks.

 _If it reels around again, yeah,_ Jean replies, curt. _I don’t care what Ymir says, we’re a team, not her lackey. Power up the clip and hold it – the Kaiju will see us._

But the Kaiju looks right through them, ignoring the glow of the plasma canon and thrashing around in the water, limbs wild and teeth snarling – searching for Johtun.

“Crap!” Ymir hisses over the comms, as the Kaiju takes a swing at them, the arm coming at them too high and too fast to make a clean cut at with their circular saws.

“Go for the spinal cord!” Marco cries, and in his distraction, he lets the plasma caster extinguish in his hand.

Johtun Apostle leaps free of the swinging claw, jumping high in the air and landing hard upon the Kaiju’s back, her saw driving deep into the rippling flesh with a spurt of blue blood. The tissue is callous – the saw doesn’t nearly go deep enough. Screeching, the Kaiju reels backwards, and Johtun goes flying, her flailing claws failing to find friction upon the slick skin, tumbling into the water dangerously close to the Kaiju’s stomping feet.

“Shit–!” Jean hisses, twisting his hand and powering up his plasma caster. He doesn’t have time to think. “Weapons engaging, I’m going to fire –”

Jean lights up the dark with a blast of ultraviolet energy, and it tears into the Kaiju’s underbelly, sending it hurtling backwards, and into Johtun as she slowly raises herself from the waves.

“Jean, you – _mmph_!” Ymir crackles, Johtun being pushed beneath the surface once more. “What did I say, you stupid –”

The Kaiju roars, twisting around and searching manically for the thorn in its side. One of its claws swipes at Johtun, talons tearing into her chest with the screech of metal and the blaze of yellow sparks. Ymir and Krista grapple the gangly arm with both of Johtun’s razor-fists, grappling with all their strength to hold the arm against them as the Kaiju wriggles and flails and roars.

“Johtun!” Jean yells, “We have to hit it with another blast, it’s going to rip you to shreds –!”

“Hold back, Jean, hold back!” Krista cries, amidst Ymir’s boorish grunts as she strains against the Kaiju’s strength. “We’re going to cut the arm off, hold back–”

The other claw rams into Jotun’s back, seizing them in a pincered grasp, talons locking them in an iron vice.

“Hold back, hold back,” Krista continues to cry, “We have an opening–! Hold back!”

How can they hold back? It’s right there, its chest open and unprotected. _It’s right, fucking there –_

“Jean!” Marco cries, “The jaw! Johtun’s gonna–!”

The talons sink deeper into Johtun’s metal flesh, and in their ears, Jean and Marco hear Krista gasp and Ymir yelp in pain. The Kaiju’s jaw wrenches open, serpentine and horrific, a gaping grin of dagger teeth, all violence and all power, and Johtun doesn’t turn fast enough – it’s going to rip her head off with one bite–

They move as one – him and Marco and Whiskey – without time for thought. It’s just instinct, driven by muscle memory and collective fear and Jean’s desperate need that Eren planted within him to be reckless.

_I’m going to kill them all!_

Whiskey collides with Johtun shoulder-first, shoving her free from the talons of the Kaiju with the screeching scrape of metal. The Kaiju’s teeth sink into Whiskey’s right shoulder, missing her Conn-Pod, but slicing into the armour plating as if it were human skin, severing wires and bronze plates amidst a field of sparks.

Jean’s feels every damn tooth, his shoulder ablaze with biting pain – he swallows the cry of pain with a grit of his teeth that could like a fire with its friction.

“Right hemisphere plasma canon non-operational,” blurts the AI.

“Whiskey!” shouts Sasha over the comms, “You’re got a hull breech in your upper chest! It’s missed your generator but you’ve lost functionality in your right arm!”

“Plasma caster!” Jean gasps, and Marco’s already powering up his arm, ploughing clip after clip into the shoulder of the Kaiju, shaken but determined – but its bite holds strong, like a hound aggressively unwilling to give up a ball, and Jean braces himself for the searing pain of a chunk of metal being torn from Whiskey’s insides –

Johtun thunders through the air like a lightning strike, driving her saw blade into the skull of the Kaiju, carving through the spinal cord in an explosion of brain matter and blue blood that rains down upon Whiskey’s Conn-Pod like a plague from God.

Everything goes slack – the jaw of the Kaiju, its gangly arms, its arachnid-like body, Jean’s consciousness. He feels his mind burning up, eating itself from the inside out where the cries of Carla Jaeger rear their ugly heads and pierce through the veil of the Drift, unrelenting. He cowers, raising his hands to his ears – _stop, stop, dear God, please stop_ – and as the Kaiju drops Whiskey from its mouth in a putrid, dying breath, Whiskey crumbles to her knees.

“Jean–” Marco breathes.

“–you stupid fuck!” Ymir rages.

“The Kaiju is down,” Krista says, “I repeat, Marshall, the Kaiju is down. No pulse. Both Johtun and Whiskey have sustained critical damage. Please send air support.”

* * *

 

**JUNE 8, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

Ymir shoves Jean against the wall of the corridor the moment he steps out of the Drivesuit Room, clutching his aching shoulder. The wind rattles from his lungs, and the back of his head stings brutally as it hits concrete.

“You have some grovelling to do!” she snarls, and this – this is the Ymir that has crawled back from Hell so many times, not the flaky and jovial and wise-cracking woman he sits with in the canteen three times a day. She shakes him violently by the shoulders. “Greenie I can fucking excuse, but you! I told you to stay back – but you almost got us both killed! Get Eren fucking Jaeger out of your head! It’s been months!”

“He’s not in my head–!” Jean snaps, and everything in his body hurts. He hears Marco calling for him – out loud or in his head, he doesn’t know – as the commotion reaches his ears.

“Fuck that!” Ymir hisses, “You can’t even look at his when he’s on the fucking news!”

Hands find her shoulders, yanking her away from Jean. Jean’s knees give-out, his hand scrambling at the wall to keep himself upright, stooping as he begs to keep himself off the floor.

“Ymir, stop!” Marco cries – both his hands holding her tight by her upper arms as she tries to lash out again. “This is not going to solve anything!”

“Eren Jaeger has a death wish!” Ymir shrieks, oblivious, “You know that, I know that – you _know_ that’s why Atlas Rogue was doomed from the start! He’s _psychotic_! And you! You still think you’re Drifting with him! You got kicked out, Jean, dammit–!”

“Rangers!” booms Marshal Smith’s deafening voice from down the corridor. Marco leaps apart from Ymir, jumping to attention. Ymir lunges for Jean again, but Krista’s voice from the Marshal’s side is shrill and commanding.

“Ymir, stop! Leave him alone!”

Ymir bares her teeth and Jean winces, coiling against the wall, wounded. Both of them turn to look at the Marshal strides towards them, his blue eyes furious.

“What is going on here?” he demands.

“I’m trying to get the bottom of why we almost _died_ out there, sir,” Ymir hisses, “This floozy is a liability if he can’t get his head under control! We’re not gonna win any wars by flinging ourselves into the damn firing line!”

“Kirschtein,” the Marshal says, turning his attention to Jean. “Care to explain why you disobeyed direct orders out there?”

“Johtun Apostle was in trouble, sir,” Jean grits, “She needed our help.”

“She said herself to hold back,” the Marshal insists, “Why didn’t you?”

“We were _there_ ,” Jean simmers, “You can’t just expect us to stand around and look pretty, sir – we’ve trained for this. We’re here to _fight_.”

“You don’t know how to fight,” Ymir snipes, “You only know how to get lucky! You’re not in Atlas Rogue anymore, Jean! You can’t just coast through by firing off your weapons and hoping for maximum damage! You can’t just –”

“I’m just as much to blame as Jean, Ymir!” Marco interrupts gallantly. Jean is acutely aware of Marco’s feelings in that moment – and it’s more than he could gather from just a look or a touch. Jean’s own skin bristles, the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, his own heart burns with a devoted anger, the sort of anger that blazes white-hot, and not red. It’s more than the whisper of a connection jittering across the thin threads of the Drift that pass back and forth between them. It’s like he knows where Marco is, beyond seeing him by his side – it’s like Jean can feel the way atoms distort around him, the way he fits intrinsically into the world. It’s an adhesive bond; Jean wants to mimic Marco’s stance, wants to raise his chin high and proud, wants to look the Marshal in the eye. He wants to – to tell them all that they were only doing their duty. Those are the words on Marco’s tongue. He tastes them upon his own.

It’s the Ghost Drift – more real than he’s even felt it before. It’s physical, it’s tangible, and it’s undeniably not a figment of his pulverised imagination. It’s not the haunting whisper of Eren in his ear – it’s a shout, proud and resolute.

Marco turns to the Marshall, standing proud with his hands clasped behind his back. “With all due respect, sir – I’m in Jean’s head too. I Drift with him. I moved that Jaeger too – we have a duty to fight Kaiju, so that’s what we decided to do! You can’t just blame it on something Jean cannot control–”

“Ranger,” the Marshal warns.

“–you’re both pilots!” Marco continues, insubordinately. “You both know what it’s like to live in someone else's head for so long! The hardest part to deal with is the silence after they’re gone, and Jean knows that better than all of us! We – we beat that Kaiju, didn’t we? _We survived_ –”

“You are still soldiers,” the Marshall says pointedly. Marco opens his mouth to retort, but the Marshal does not flinch. “And are expected to follow orders. You will be relegated to Johtun’s guard for the foreseeable future. And if that’s not adequate enough for the pair of you – well, I have a class full of trainee cadets more than willing to get in a Jaeger.”

“Marshal, sir,” Marco admonishes, “That’s a waste of what we can do, sir – this was our first drop together, we had creases to iron out–”

“Ranger. Enough,” the Marshal rebukes, “You are all dismissed. I don’t expect to see this display of insubordination from any of you again. And Kirschtein – I expect you to report to psychiatrics in the morning. Ymir is right. If emotional disturbance from your previous partner is affecting your capabilities, I expect you to see it rectified. Now, on your way. All of you.”

The Marshal strides past, brushing shoulders with both Ymir and Marco, and a difficult silence distorts the space he occupied. Ymir half-turns towards Jean, her upper lip still furled into the remnants of a snarl, stinging words coating her teeth.

“Ymir,” Krista warns, sweeping to Ymir’s side and grasping her partner’s wrist securely. “Leave him alone. You’ve done enough. It’s time we left.”

Neither Marco nor Jean says a word as Ymir and Krista leave. Jean can feel the questions revolving inside Marco’s head, desperate to be said, but Jean’s disarray keeps them all at bay. He starts walking towards his room without even looking back; Marco follows him like a shadow.

Jean expects him to peel away to his own cabin once they reach the pilots’ quarters, and then they would both suffer alone through the night, only to reconvene at breakfast with an air of uncertainty – but as Jean leans into his door and heaves it open with a grunt of pain, Marco’s hand is above his head, seizing the weight of the door. Jean looks back over his shoulder and is met with a soft, sympathetic smile, much closer than he expected.

“Hey,” Marco murmurs, “Let me get that.”

Marco holds the door open, and Jean slips into his room, his bed covers strewn across his mattress and the floor from where he leapt from sleep not three hours earlier. The weight of the world seems to come crashing down upon his already-weary shoulders, and he barely makes it to his bed before he face-plants with a grunt.

He hears Marco tidying up around him – stooping low to grab discarded clothes, tossing them back into Jean’s trunk, and sweeping the disordered papers upon Jean’s desk into a pile. Jean inhales deeply – his sheets smell faintly of musk and sweat, more than a little bit musty. His shoulder twinges when he tries to shift a little.

The mattress dips beside him as Marco sits down upon the edge, and then shuffles backwards, until his back is against the wall. He radiates warmth. Jean longs to be closer. When did it become this way between them? Jean’s not sure, but it’s as easy as a sigh, something he never had with Eren, who was always a battle. They would kick and fight and tussle – not to hurt each other, but to feel close. A headlock here, a playful jostle in the corridors there. It wasn’t a bad thing, and sometimes he forgets that, but his brain is tired of being in a constant state of alert. With Marco, he feels like he could drift off into sleep.

Jean tilts his head and cracks open an eye, peeking up at Marco.

“The Marshal was an ass back there,” Marco says, and Jean can’t help but snort.

“Don’t say ass,” he muses, his voice muffled, “You sound like me.”

“Maybe that’s why he was mad,” Marco remarks audaciously, “But really? He was so far out of order, it was stratospheric.”

“Thank you for defending me,” Jean mumbles then, “You didn’t have to. You know Eren was there. Ymir was right about that much.”

“Of course I had to. And we would’ve done what we did with or without Eren. I know that for certain. I wasn’t about to let Johtun march in there alone, not when we were sitting on the side-lines waiting for a tag-in.”

“How insubordinate of you,” Jean chuckles lightly, but it fizzles out into a huff as the slight shake in his chest inflames his bruised nerves. “Ouch.”

“Are you hurt?” Marco asks immediately, although he must already know the answer intimately. “Where?”

“My right shoulder,” Jean grumbles, easing himself up into a sitting position haltingly. He winces, twisting himself around until he’s flat against the wall, shoulder to shoulder with Marco. He curls the fingers of his good arm around his shoulder and tries to roll the joint gently, grimacing at every twinge. He leans forward a bit, trying to get a better feel of his shoulder blade and back. “When the Kaiju bit us. I think the interface fried my nerves. And Ymir probably didn’t help.”

“Let me take a look,” Marco hushes, Jean’s hands replaced with Marco’s careful ones. His palms are cool and soothing, the span of his hands broad. He presses into Jean’s skin, and it feels good.

“Y-yup,” Jean rasps, his breath catching in his throat. “There. What do you think?”

“T-take your shirt off,” Marco whispers, and Jean goes still. “I want a better look.”

Marco’s hands, as strong and deft as they ever were grasping his bō in the Kwoon Room, slide down his back, his fingers toying at the hem of Jean’s shirt. Words feel obsolete, the crystalline transparency of what is felt more than enough to get a point across. They don’t address it. They don’t need to. Jean leans a little further forward, and lets Marco’s hands slip beneath his shirt, pushing it up and over Jean’s head. The beat of their parallel hearts is hypnotic.

Goosebumps pucker Jean’s skin in the cold air, but Marco’s breath is warm, dancing across the nape of Jean’s neck like billowing smoke. His hands return to Jean’s bad shoulder, smoothing across the bruised and battered skin, probing at the withered muscle and tattered nerves, which simmer and spark with things Jean reckons has little to do with pain. Marco’s tender hands upon him are meant to be; it’s like the Drift. A natural fit. A lullaby. A summer warmth.

Jean sighs aloud.

The feeling of Marco in his space – that sense of permanence, of camaraderie, of _meant-to-be_ – Jean realises he cares for it a lot.

“Maybe you should see physio tomorrow,” Marco whispers.

“Just keep touching me,” Jean replies.

You always end up a little bit in love, some way or another, with the person with whom you Drift.

 

* * *

 

**JUNE 9, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

The teeth marks that mar Whiskey Dawn’s pauldrons and chest plate are kind of admirable, as far as battle scars go. Sure, Jean has always been careful to keep the circuitry burns upon his stomach and ribs to himself, but Whiskey wears hers like medals, and it’s _badass_.  

Ymir and the Marshal would probably say differently, but neither of them is here. Jean can think what he wants – and he knows Marco agrees with him, even if he’s not _with him_.

“She took a beating, huh?” comes Sasha’s voice as she apparates at Jean’s side, chin tilted up and bright eyes focussed on Whiskey high above their heads. She’s wiping her hands in a towel, already black with oil. Judging by the chaos of her appearance, Jean doesn’t think she’s slept since they got back from Seattle, straight to work on buffing the dents out of Whiskey’s armour.

“Looks kinda cool though,” Jean muses, “Like she’s finally earned her stripes.”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Sasha grins wickedly, “She looks so much better. Maybe I’ll get my ink touched up to match.”

Jean manages a smile, even if he still feels a little winded from the day before. His shoulder feels remarkably better, however.

“What’s the damage then?” he asks, “How angry is the Marshal?”

“It’s not as bad as everyone was making out,” Sasha admits, “Luckily Smiler didn’t tear out too many components, just dislodged them, so I managed to stuff most of it back into the arm. Got a bit of wiring to go back in and do, but otherwise her arm’s basically functional again. Other than that – some water damage to the core, but nothing that can’t be fixed with a hairdryer and an Argos catalogue. I might reinforce the chest again, if we’re thinking about letting her keep some of those scrapes.”

“Right,” Jean says, “And – and what about Johtun?”

Sasha’s smile withers into a flat line. She flings her towel over her shoulders, both hands coming to rest on her hips.

“She’s worse off,” Sasha says plainly, not beating around the bush. She turns to look at Jean, and away from Whiskey. “But it’s always worse when you’re flying nuclear. Those things are way less stable, and any sorta breach of the hull could be bad. Connie thinks it’ll probably take a couple weeks to fix her up.”

“Ymir will be mad that she won’t be able to Drift.”

“Ymir’s always mad,” Sasha shrugs, “It coulda been worse. Way worse. You guys did the right thing out there, intercepting as you did. We coulda been putting Johtun back together from scraps we found on the sea floor.”

“Tell that to the Marshal,” Jean grumbles, “He thinks I’m unreliable. Because of – because of Atlas. I guess he has a point.”

“Puh- _lease_ ,” Sasha drolls, “It’s a battle, not some … choreographed dance! You never _truly_ know what’s gonna happen, so all you have to rely on is instinct. They know that. They also know about your history with Eren – _as if_ it was something they didn’t expect. I made sure to tell them _myself_ after what an ass you were during those first few weeks of training!”

“And what if one day I don’t have Eren’s instincts anymore?” Jean asks, “What if I wake up one day and I’m just _me_ , and my only instinct is to run?”

“Then I’d say you’re a damn smart man, Jean.”

Jean shakes his head, his smile wry.

“Maybe you should be a pilot. I hear the Marshal might have an opening on Whiskey soon.”

Sasha wrinkles her nose, buffeting Jean in the arm with a closed fist.

“Nah,” she says, “You guys are gonna need me. Me, you, Marco, and Whiskey. That’s the team, none of these other moaners and complainers. But maybe I’ll think about it. _Y’never know what’s gonna happen._ ”

 

* * *

 

**JUNE 13, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

It takes Ymir four days to apologise, and honestly, Jean is impressed. He knows humility doesn’t come easy to her – or any of them really, so Hell bent on living that apologising for trying to survive feels like a waste of precious energy.

It’s late at night when it happens. Jean’s room is a little less bare: there are books on his shelves now, some given to him by the Shatterdome shrink about controlling anger issues, and others old fiction that Marco has lent him over the months, battered and moth-eaten manuscripts many years out of print. His desk too, has become a second home for Marco’s overflow of tinkered gadgets and half-finished prototypes, which Jean helps him with sometimes, when they probably should be training, but would much prefer to skive.

This particular night, he’s too tired. Not to skive – just to work. His brain feels frazzled, and the cloud that has loomed over his head since the drop has been drizzling him with stormy rain non-stop. The psychiatrist wasn’t great either, having him dig up old memories of Tokyo, and talk about his feelings of betrayal and lost trust he had laid to rest months ago.

He lies on his bed, half asleep and half awake, his arms spread out wide. Marco is next to him in quiet companionship, propped up on one of his pillows, a novel in his hands. Jean’s legs are flopped across his lap.

Jean likes watching him read – it’s soothing. Escapism. Marco imagines things vividly, and the Ghost Drift is like a personal movie theatre inside Jean’s head, telling him a story he doesn’t have to focus on. He dreams lucidly of heroes and armour and great battles on the sand swamped by calamity.

“Wha’ you reading?” he mumbles sleepily. Marco chuckles, folding the corner of his page over, even if every other is dog-eared beyond repair. He drops a hand to Jean’s knee, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“The Iliad,” he replies, showing Jean the cover. The colours are faded, the title completely scratched off. “Why? You like it?”

“Achilles is full of himself,” Jean murmurs, “He doesn’t deserve Patroclus.”

“It’s Patroclus’ choice,” Marco smiles, “He sticks around because he clearly sees something in Achilles that’s good, beneath all the – well. Murdering. I think Achilles has a problem.”

“You like him anyway,” Jean retorts, squinting at Marco beneath his droopy eyelids. “You’ve been reading every other line three times over.”

“I like the prose!” Marco defends, “Here, like this: _t_ _here is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad_. Don’t you think that reminds you of the Drift? I wonder if Achilles and Patroclus would’ve been Drift Compatible?”

“It’s too late for this,” Jean grumbles, throwing an arm across his face. “I want to sleep and mope. Mainly mope.”

It’s at that moment that Ymir arrives, no knock and no warning, as she flings open the door all parts a hurricane. She looks flustered, her hair falling out of her barrette and her clothes crumpled and unkempt. There’s a scowl knitting her eyebrows together, a sneer wrinkling her nose.

Jean sits up immediately, swinging his legs free of Marco. If she wants to slam him against a wall and berate him again, he wants to at least have a fighting chance this time–

“I came to say sorry,” she snaps, as if furious at herself. She wants to say more, but she twists her mouth up into a grimace and glares at the floor.

“… Alright?” Marco starts slowly, clearly bewildered. “… Why?”

“Krista says I have to be nicer or she won’t marry me once the war is over,” Ymir explains, still staring at the ground. “I – I was wrong. About our last drop. You guys … did what you thought was best in the heat of the moment.”

“Is this you apologising, or Krista forcing you to apologise by withholding sex?” Jean says, “Because there’s a difference. And it matters.”

“It’s me, you ass!” Ymir complains loudly, “I’m not an emotionless moron, I–”

She scuffs the floor with her boot, clearly uncomfortable. Modesty is so rarely in her vocabulary that she struggles with its language.

“I have a present. For you,” she mutters, “I don’t know if it’ll make-up for what I said, but maybe it’ll – whatever. Just take it.”

She throws a parcel at Jean which lands with a _thump_ and a bounce on his bed. It’s wrapped in newspaper, two days old, and tied with a shoelace. It’s soft – it feels like fabric when Jean puts his hands upon it.

“There’s one for you too, Marco,” Ymir pouts, “I left it in your room. You weren’t there. Obviously.”

Jean rips apart the paper, and then, in his hands, he holds a brown-leather sheepskin jacket, a little worn and weathered. Upon the breast is the logo of the PPDC, subscribed by a motto: _whosoever’s is the storm_.

Jean turns the jacket over, and on the back, in big, bold, gold lettering is WHISKEY DAWN. A Roman legionary’s helmet forms the A in DAWN, its plume bright crimson.

“You should bin your old one,” Ymir says, “I heard Atlas Rogue is old news.”

Jean shakes the jacket out, and admires it in its entirety. He finds forgiveness is no bitter medicine, not really. Some forgivings take a lifetime; others take seconds. Ymir begins to slink away, her message delivered and her tail between her legs, embarrassed.

“Ymir,” Jean calls, stopping her in the doorway. “I heard Johtun’s operational again. We’ll see you tomorrow in the harbour for training, right?”

A small, dry smile unfurls upon Ymir’s thin lips. She ducks her head and huffs.

“Sure. Why the Hell not.”

* * *

 

**JUNE 21, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

There’s this pattern in life, Jean has found, where something hopeful is almost immediately followed by something dreadful. Maybe it’s karmic balance, or the preservation of energy, or just some cruel game played by whatever God sends monsters through the Breach every other month.

It’s the longest day of the year: the summer solstice. The sun rises at half past four, and does not set ‘til nearly midnight, a bewildering nineteen and a half hours of sunlight. It’s not quite cold enough for Jean to see his breath – he even forgoes his winter coat, wandering outside onto the helicopter landing pads in a t-shirt and his leather jacket draped over his shoulders.

“Everyone’s looking at me weird,” says Marco, rubbing his gloved hands together in front of his mouth as he breathes hot air onto his fingers. The same cannot be said for him – Alaskan summers are still bitterly cold in comparison to tropical Peruvian heat and the mild climate of San Francisco. “I want to know why is everyone else is wandering around in short sleeves!? Are they crazy?”

The sun is about to set, and the sky is almost clear: the clouds are dappled in pink and orange, vibrant against the jet-blue reflected by the sea. The mountains behind the city are violet in their snow-capped splendour. Sometimes they forget that the neon colours of their Conn-Pod can exist without the touch of man. It’s hard to remember that there’s a world beyond the Shatterdome and the thrashing sea beyond the Anchorage inlet.

A helicopter arrives on the landing pad, the _whop_ of its propeller blades kicking up a wind that ruffles through Jean’s hair. It’s the only sound besides the sigh of the sea and the faint hum of human life in the city.

Jean rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, hands deep in his pockets. It’s hard to say he feels content – but he could be close, in another life. Marco’s shoulder brushes against his, and it feels natural, that liminal touch. Like an extension of the Drift; like every brush Jean can steal of Marco’s fingers is a flash of the neural handshake to which he is so addicted. If Marco notices that Jean seeks out touches, he says nothing. Jean reckons it’s because Marco is just as greedy. They’re happy playing this game. Maybe one day those touches will distort into something more; Jean looks forward to that day. He used to be willing to let it manifest, but there’s something in his gut wiggling with impatience.

He wonders if this is how it’s meant to happen, without the catalyst of the Drift. Slowly, slowly, and then all at once.

“We should take a holiday,” Jean says suddenly, “I know we get no vacation days, but – well. We won’t get another Kaiju through the Breach for at least a month, and it’ll probably go south.”

“Where do you have in mind?” Marco chuckles.

“Tokyo is nice,” Jean says, “Maybe it’s time to go back. I kinda want to show you around. I think you’d like it. But I don’t know if the Marshal would subsidise our plane tickets. I guess we’ll have to settle on a weekend in a hotel downtown. I haven’t actually seen the city.”

“Wow, romantic,” Marco snorts, causing Jean to blush. He tries to hide his reddened cheeks in the sheepskin collar of his jacket as he hunches his shoulders, but Marco just nudges him with a cheery and unforgiving smile. “When it’s all over – Tokyo. Let’s go. I want to know what other food exists in the world besides salmon risotto and porridge– is that the Marshal?”

“Huh – what?” Jean says, twisting around to look in the direction Marco is now pointing. The Marshal is one deck, accompanied by the familiar blonde head of Krista at his left, and Fightmaster Levi on his right. They’re striding rapidly towards the helicopter that has just landed.

“Looks serious,” Marco muses. A figure leaps from the helicopter before the blades have fully powered down – Jean realises quickly that it’s Professor Hanji from K-Science, accompanied thereafter by their assistant Moblit, drowning beneath a pile of boxes. “I didn’t even know Hanji was off-base.”

“Black market Kaiju parts is my guess,” Jean remarks candidly. “It was serious business back in Tokyo. Hong Kong too. Something about Hanji makes me think they don’t really care for protocol. Couldn’t say what it is. Not a clue.”

Marco sniggers, but they both know Professor Hanji’s story: chief engineer of Eden Spirit, up to and including her last ever flight. When Eden went down, and no-one wanted to repair the Mark I corpse, Hanji turned to cryptozoology and _Kaiju_. Jean doesn’t really see the appeal. Naturally.

“Uh oh,” Marco then says, straightening up beside him. “Marshall coming this way. Look smart, Jean. It must be serious.”

“When do I ever not look smart?” Jean retorts, standing to attention. “Don’t answer that. I can read your thoughts, remember. If only people knew what a smart ass you really are.”

“Rangers,” Marshal Smith greets them, his voice grave. The news can’t be good, but Jean feels like nothing can really dampen his good mood. “We have a development. Report to LOCCENT for briefing in five minutes.”

Professor Hanji was in Hong Kong – Jean was correct in his assumptions to an extent. They went to see a contact of theirs, specialising in dissected Kaiju parts, but thought to drop in on the Shatterdome once called home by Eden Spirit.

Scientists in the Hong Kong lab have an algorithm. The word doesn’t sit right in the room – every officer, ever J-Tech, every ranger shifting uncomfortably on their feet and passing worried glances between each other. The tension is palpable.

Scientists in the Hong Kong lab have an algorithm, and it predicts events at the Breach. So far, it has been right every single time, the energy signatures it predicts accurate right down to the classification of the Kaiju.

Marshal Smith swallows thickly before he continues. Jean has never seen such a lack of composure upon the man’s face. Sweat beads upon his brow.

“The next Breach event will be in no more than ten weeks. And it will be a double event. We will see two Kaiju emerge from the Breach simultaneously. That is a fact.”

Panicked whispers fly around the LOCCENT bridge like a disease. The war is far from over.

It’s not difficult to explain how the mood in the Shatterdome changes – Jean has seen it all before, in those last days of his in Tokyo. Sombre, serious, and severe, it’s as if the last beacon of hope that was keeping the Alaskan temperament at bay has been extinguished. Jean hears little laughter between friends in the hallways and more commotion in the hangars. The J-Tech teams work until they’re dead on their feet; the bags beneath Sasha’s eyes grow purple, like bruises, the longer she goes without sleep.

The Marshal has everyone working double time. They have to be twice as good at everything they do when they’re facing twice the threat. People hardly talk in the canteen, eyes fixated on the screens that are never turned off now, constantly revolving through news channels, just waiting for the inevitable. Krista is ferried between diplomatic meeting and diplomatic meeting, the face of the Jaeger programme at Anchorage, cutting deals and devising drop teams, whilst Ymir locks herself in the Kwoon most nights with a punching bag, music on loud and impenetrable.

The drop team is to be the Russian Corinthian Wasp and the L.A-based Helios Shrike, with both Johtun and Whiskey running point for each of them. Wasp has been relocated from the icy stretches of Vladivostok to the Shatterdome at Hong Kong, far closer to the Breach. No chances are being taken.

Most nights, Marco doesn’t leave Jean’s room, the pair of them collapsing onto Jean’s mattress in a heap, too exhausted to do anything but close their eyes until their alarm blares – either bringing the next day, or bringing the storm, whichever that might be. It’s easier this way. It’s easier to be close. The longer they can stay in the Drift, the better.

It’s hard to sleep when a hurricane rumbles through your thoughts. But it’s harder still when the warning still rages on the radio, and all you can do is batten down the hatches.

* * *

 

**AUGUST 31, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

Ten weeks to the day of Hanji’s damning news, the Kaiju alert sirens blare. It’s not a drill. Jean throws himself out of bed with a soul made of steel.

“Whiskey Dawn, report to Bay 02, level A-67,” blares the PA. “Kaiju. Double event. Code name: Bigmouth. Category II. 6700 metric tons. Code name: Sokohito Category III. 8400 metric tons.”

He throws on his leather jacket over his t-shirt, hopping around on one foot into his boots. Marco stirs on his bed, still in his training clothes from the night before – he hasn’t budged since he fell asleep reading, not that Jean thinks he even made it through a page. The book is still open upon his chest.

Jean hops over to the bed, jostling Marco firmly.

“Hey. Hey, Marco, wake up,” he says, “There’s movement in the Breach. It’s time. We’re being deployed.”

“What time is it?” Marco grumbles wearily.

“Three. In the morning,” Jean says.  He reaches for Marco’s leather jacket, slung over the back of Jean’s chair. He tosses it onto the bed. “No rest for the wicked. C’mon.”

* * *

 

**AUGUST 31, 2018. MIRACLE MILE, SANTA MONICA BAY, LOS ANGELES.**

“Targets in pursuit of Wasp,” says LOCCENT in Jean’s ear. “Repeat, in pursuit of Wasp. The orders are to engage the targets at the ten mile mark, Helios. Johtun, Whiskey, hold back and do not let them breech the Miracle Mile. You are the last line of defence between the Kaiju and the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area. No pressure.”

“Right you are, LOCCENT,” says Reiner Braun, his voice gruff. His partner, Bertholdt, remains quiet. “Johtun, Whiskey, at our back. We’re in position, Wasp.”

“We’re bringing them in,” comes Hitch’s dry lilt, slightly out of breath. “Hope you guys are ready for a party. It’s going to be a wild one.”

The Drift isn’t still – it fluctuates like a sailboat at sea, the tide that rocks it the clamour of so many voices inside their ears. If Anchorage’s LOCCENT and Ymir and Krista weren’t enough, there’s Helios and Wasp to contend with, as well as both their teams, plus the garble of half-Russian, half-Cantonese in the background.

It’s hard to concentrate. It does nothing to settle Marco’s heart, wildly beating as it is.

 “Wasp is five-hundred metres out,” says LOCCENT, “Jaegers, prepare to engage. She’s coming in fast.”

Bigmouth bursts from the waves with an ear-piercing scream that slams into Jean’s chest like whiplash. The HUD shakes, seismic tremors rippling through Whiskey’s body like an aftershock, crackling with electricity up Jean’s spine. All his muscles seize; he grits he teeth hard, and tastes blood.

Helios Shrike ploughs into the Kaiju like a wrestler, head-first, titanic arms grappling with the Kaiju in a violent struggle. The Kaiju is thrust backwards, but doesn’t fall, its claws scrabbling at Helios’ armour. It slams its bulbous, tumour-like head into the side of Helios’ Conn-Pod, and the Jaeger’s neck cracks like thunder.

“Reiner!” Ymir shouts across the comms, “You good!?”

“We’re good,” grunts Reiner, “Hold the line!”

Helios locks his arm around the neck of Bigmouth, and pummels the Kaiju in the throat with his Tesla fist, again, and again, and again, pulverising the blue flesh into mush. Kaiju blue soaks his fists, and they begin to steam. Something’s not right – Helios seizes up and stumbles backwards, shoving the Kaiju away as it hisses and recoils.

“Helios!” calls LOCCENT, “What’s going on!?”

“Hull breech!” says Reiner, “There’s something in its blood – I think it’s venom! It’s dissolving through our armour – we need artillery back-up!”

“We’re here,” Jean says, “Whiskey has long-range plasma casters. Let us help.”

“Alright,” replies Reiner, “Blast it good, Whiskey. We’ll plough it with our chest launcher when it’s stunned–”

Reiner doesn’t finish his command, a tidal wave slamming into both Helios and the Bigmouth Kaiju, hurtling them beneath the waves.

“Helios!” Jean cries into the comms, his fist tight around the plasma caster. “Helios!”

“Jean–” Marco starts. Fear. No, not fear. _Terror_.

It’s Wasp, driving through the waves with her lance in one hand and her sting blade in the other – and behind her, in terrifying pursuit, in the other Kaiju.

“What – _is that_?” Krista whispers in horror.

“It looks … like a person,” Marco says. “Jean – plasma–!”

 The Kaiju – Sokohito – is enormous and humanoid, two arms, two legs, and rippling with muscle. It has no tail, no wigs, no claws – just hardened skin plating its entire body. And it’s _fast_.

“Blast it,” Annie Leonhardt commands, “We need an opening.”

Electric lights envelop Jean’s gauntlet, and he discharges the pulse of blue energy into the air, the sparks slamming into the Kaiju’s chest, throwing it backwards, but not cutting it.

“Weapons system recharging,” says Whiskey’s AI, but Jean and Marco hardly hear it. They have one Kaiju they can’t get close to, and another that their plasma caster has no effect on.

Wasp spins in the water, twirling her lance in her hand and grasping her sting blade tight, readying for the retaliation. She looks like a twig next to the heaving muscle of the Kaiju, but as long as she’s fast enough–

Bigmouth leaps from the water like a frog, colliding with Wasp’s lance and tackling her into the sea. Sokohito seems to watch, plaintive, intelligent, _biding its time_ – and then it’s charging, on a collision course with Johtun and Whiskey.

“Shit,” Jean hisses, _Marco– the laser swords!_

Whiskey braces herself for impact, short, sharp blades of effervescent red energy emerging from her fists. Jean and Marco raise their fists to their face, ready–

Helios Shrike erupts from the water a comet of gold, his Tesla fist smashes into the under-jaw of Sokohito, shattering its plated armour like sandalwood.

The Kaiju reels away with a tempest roar, swinging its own fists wildly, making contact with Helios’ shoulder. Sparks fly, but Helios doesn’t fall.

“Wasp!” comes the call of Bertholdt, a voice Jean doesn’t know well. “Annie! Don’t let that one touch you!”

“A little too late for that,” Hitch drones, Wasp rising dangerously slowly from the water. Her lance is soaked in blue acid, bubbling and steaming as it’s eaten away. Wasp doesn’t even think twice, releasing the lance from her fist and tossing it into the sea. She draws a second sting blade from the back of her fist, and drops into a fighting stance. “Bring it, big boy.”

But Bigmouth doesn’t launch itself at Wasp. It recognises her – and looks right through her, barrelling right through her, shrieking in pain as her sting blade slide down the length of its bulbous belly, sloshing blood across Wasp’s arm – but it’s not deterred. Its beady eyes are locked on Johtun Apostle.

Johtun drops into a crouch, her saw blades whirring and her razor claws clenched like a cat ready to pounce. Jean feels Marco readying the plasma caster on his side, and stands by with his sword locked defensively outright.

It’s then that Helios is thrown aside, a mighty crash of water as Sokohito lifts him beneath the arms and tosses him aside like he were just a child. Annie’s hiss is heard across the comms, accompanied by a grunt of pain from Reiner, as Sokohito starts to wade through the water, slow at first, and then faster, more determined, more–

“They’re going after Johtun!” Marco cries out in horror, as the gut-wrenching realisation dawns upon them all. “Marshal, do you hear us?! The Kaiju are going after Johtun Apostle! They’re deliberately targeting the Mark I!”

“She’s nuclear,” Jean hisses, “They know her core is unstable – _they know_. How do they know?! Shit!”

“Whiskey!” commands Marshal Smith, “Do not leave that line! You are the last line of defence for the city! Do not leave that line!”

“We got this,” Ymir growls, “Bring it on–”

Bigmouth springs at them, and Johtun shreds the Kaiju’s skin into ribbons with her claws, the sky raining blood. Her silver armour simmers, but her claws glint with blood-lust, diamond-tipped and impenetrable. Bigmouth staggers, toppling to the side into the water.

Jean wastes no time in blasting the Kaiju’s head open with one, two, three spurts of his plasma caster, emptying the clip into the bubbling flesh.

“Alright!” Ymir crows, “One down! Helios, Wasp, why did you guys even turn up, we don’t–!”

Sokohito ploughs into them like they’re nothing, batting Johtun’s five-hundred tonne arm away like it’s a bug on the windshield, ripping out the circuitry and hydraulics that hold Johtun together. Jean’s blood runs cold. He can’t breathe – and nor can Marco – staring in adamantine horror as Johtun is torn apart.

_It’s like Foxtrot all over again–!_

_Marco! Marco, no! Don’t chase the RABIT, Marco!_

Johtun scrabbles with her good arm, driving her saws into the chest of the Kaiju, again, and again, and again, searing through the armour and the muscle and the bone – but Sokohito keeps comes, smashing its skull into Johtun’s Conn-Pod with a deafening crash.

There’s a gurgling sound across the comms, someone drowning in a mouthful of blood, and then screams of pain – _Krista_.

“Ymir! Ymir, Ymir, Ymir!”

Sokohito grasps Johtun by either shoulder – and he pulls. He pulls, splitting Johtun down the middle in a waterfall of sparks and bright light, her Conn Pod splintering free and crashing into the sea.

“Marshal!” Jean cries out, his throat scorched bloody and raw, tears pouring down his face, born from Marco’s eyes. “Marshal! Johtun’s Conn-Pod! We have to save them, we have to–!”

“No!” booms the Marshal, and it’s like a knife to each of their guts, doubling them over. “Whiskey is not damaged! Do not compromise yourself! Johtun is gone – hold the line, Rangers! That is an order!”

Helios Shrike charges at the Kaiju, barrelling into its back with both arms wrapping around the Kaiju’s stomach with the force of a hurricane. Sokohito drops the carcass of Johtun, and her arms fall limp into the sea, her burning core sinking like a stone.

 _Jean–_ Marco begs inside his head. _Ymir and Krista! We have to–!_

_We will!_

Saving people is in Marco’s nature – that blind and giddy sense of heroism, that drive to serve a system that let Jean down too many times to count and left him suffering in the carcass of a giant, that noble need to do good, against any odds – but this is different. This isn’t fifteen million strangers in a city they’ve never seen.

These are their friends. They will not leave them to die.

Saving people is in Marco’s nature – so now it’s in Jean’s nature too.

_Look at me now, Eren. I’m more like you than I ever was. I’m an idiot with a death wish. Are you proud?_

Jean’s eyes are on the prize – no thoughts of Helios struggling with the might of the Kaiju, or Wasp clambering to her feet, her right arm hanging limp at her side where the oily film of acid in the water has begun to cut into her circuitry systems – he sees the bubble of Johtun’s sinking Conn-Pod in the water, and the world around him no longer exists. There is just the Drift, eerier in its silence.

“Whiskey!” shouts the Marshal, “Whiskey, what the Hell are you doing–?!”

“C’mon, Whiskey!” screeches Connie Springer, over the top of the Marshal. “Keep going! Keep going! Fifty meters, sinking fast – you can still reach them!”

It happens so fast. He and Marco – they move as one. They always have, even since they first stepped into the Drift together – but it’s more than that suddenly. They are one, one mind, one consciousness, one drive: _save Johtun, save Johtun, save Johtun_. Jean feels every emotion Marco has ever felt, every hurt, every heartbeat, every flutter. He tastes fear and sorrow and love, and it clogs up his throat, rummaging through his veins, setting his synapses on fire with the tidal wave of impulses that slams into him like a tsunami, and he is King Cnut, feeble hands outstretched in defiance.

Whiskey streaks through the water and lunges for Johtun’s Conn-Pod, her laser blades vaporizing the sea water in a flash. The steam burns through the cockpit, their Drivesuit armour searing against their skin, their circuitry suits alight with red-hot wire.

Sokohito throws Helios free with a roar, and charges at them, a bulldozer of bloody fury. Whiskey’s fists clamps around something solid on the sea bed. Jean yanks it to their chest, and Marco turns, Whiskey twisting out of the water, and driving her remaining blade straight through the jaw of the looming Kaiju, piercing through the roof of its roaring mouth, and spearing into the soft and pliant flesh of its brain.

The Kaiju collapses, snuffed out like a candle. Its mighty bulk falls on Whiskey, and her legs give out, weak and wobbly, as she’s pushed down into the sea.

Jean’s ears ring. Sirens blare across the Conn-Pod, their HUD fizzing and spluttering, their consoles spewing out sparks.

“Switching to oxygen reserves,” informs the AI. “Hull compromised, 25%. Water damage to plasma casters.”

“Helios, Wasp!” comes Sasha’s desperate cries, somewhere far, far away, smothered by the rush of adrenaline flooding every corner of Jean’s body, every nook, every cranny, every tattered nerve end– “Save Whiskey! She’s under there! Save Whiskey!”

A strong hand yanks Jean by the shoulder in the Drift, neither his, nor Marco’s nor Eren’s. He is pulled towards the surface, the clouds of the neural bridge parting as the light of the moon beats a path of milky white through the sea. The shadowy figure of Helios Shrike forms on the HUD, and Whiskey jerks forward with a spasmic shudder.

When they breach the water’s surface, Jean gasps for air as if he were being born anew. Thunderous applause explodes across the comms system, cheers and shouts and sobbing laughter, dizzying and disorienting.

“Whiskey,” comes Reiner’s voice, stern, “Are you alright?”

“We’re okay,” Marco breathes, and in the Conn-Pod, he looks across as Jean. He smiles, bright and dazzling and _relieved_. Their bond blazes. They’re alive. The Kaiju is dead. They did that, together. _They’re alive_. “We’re okay!”

“Oh, thank God!” Sasha splutters in their ears, too loud, and they both wince. Spurts of pain seize in Jean’s shoulder, ricocheting all the way down his arm – it’s only when he moves it, does he realise he’s still clutching something solid to his chest.

Johtun’s Conn-Pod. They have it.

“Marshal!” Jean cries, “Get medivac here now! Hurry!”

 

* * *

 

Emotions run high on the journey back to the Anchorage Shatterdome. Ymir and Krista are alive – _just_. They are both airlifted straight to the emergency care unit at Cedars-Sinai in central Los Angeles, every helicopter in the United States appearing from out of the sunrise like a swarm of starlings. Sasha tells Jean that it’s touch and go, but Connie doesn’t seem to care, wailing over the comms that he’s going to kiss them both once they land for saving his girls.

They did that. Johtun Apostle is in shreds and shards of metal at the bottom of Santa Monica Bay, but her pilots – they’re alive. They were saved.

Victory reigns supreme across the LOCCENT officers of Hong Kong and Los Angeles, singing Whiskey’s praises as Helios and Wasp return to base as heroes.

Anchorage LOCCENT is unnervingly silent. Words are sparse throughout the flight home, the Marshal absent, and Connie and Sasha gone, making preparations for the retrieval of Johtun’s fragments before they become food for the fish. Jean says nothing to Marco, and the Drift stays quiet, a soft and sighing, ebbing tide, punctuated only by the odd command picked up from the helicopters overhead, dragging Whiskey back to Alaska with the break of dawn. Jean lets himself be rocked by it, his body heavy, but his mind awake, if blank. The adrenaline has him hyperaware, and as that slowly fades, he finds himself in shock, cold and horrid.

As Whiskey settles into her bay, and Jean and Marco disembark into the Drivesuit Room, the technicians greet them with sombre smiles. No-one says a word, solemn hands helping them shrug free of their Drivesuits, their skin bruised and swollen beneath the armour after so many hours spent harnessed to the Pons System. Jean’s head feels like it might explode when he tugs off his helmet, the relief of pressure on his temples almost euphoric.

He realises, intrinsically, that they almost died. Not just him – but all of them. Wasp and Helios, Ymir and Krista, even Marco – every drop is a risk, but somehow, this one was closer, tighter, so barely there on the edge of the chasm that a gust of wind might have changed the tide of the fight.

Before – he almost died every time he fell out of alignment with Eren. Every single shattering of the Drift between them was a risk, and yet – he never cared. Not like this. He cared about the _why_ , and the _how_ , and the _what now_ , but never the _what after_.

He cares about the what after now. He cares about living, about getting past tomorrow, about seeing a world where he can live in peace and go on dates to bars and read the Iliad and take Marco to Tokyo to see the sites.

It could’ve been them, not Johtun, and he could’ve lost Marco to the fury of the Kaiju. It’s that thought that terrifies him beyond rational measure.

He glances over at Marco, the technicians buzzing around him like insects, and finds he’s already looking. Jean feels a tension coil in his gut, winding around his organs, and squeezing. He feels rubbed raw, every part of him tender to a touch. He has been stripped of his armour, and now he’s vulnerable and desperate.  

There’s a strange atmosphere in the hallways and in the passages of the Shatterdome: every J-Tech they pass looks drawn and withered, but summons a proud and pertinent smile in their direction, an acknowledging nod, a clap on the back. There’s triumph in the air, but it’s bogged down by the loss they all have suffered.

Johtun Apostle has not left Anchorage in all her years of service. She was born here, and here she stayed, the guardian of the Pacific Northwest and the great Alaskan frontier. It isn’t right that she died so far away from home. The base is grieving.

Jean feels much the same, victory and viscery in a precarious balance over his heart, tipping this way and that and threatening to fall. He picks up the pace, and Marco matches him stride for stride, their heartbeats in desperate synchronicity.

The moment Jean’s bedroom door is closed, Jean grabs Marco by the shirt sleeves and slams him up against the metal, his lips on Marco’s lips, violently, desperately, _dreadfully_ – he needs to re-establish the contact of the Drift. He kisses him like the world almost came to an end, his mouth running ragged and his fists tangled in Marco’s hair. Marco’s fingers dig deep into Jean’s bruised shoulders, the pain grounding, and then clasp around Jean’s neck, dragging him closer. He bites down on Jean’s lower lip and swallows down a heady gasp as Jean slams him back into the wall again, every nerve in his body alight.

Jean needs to feel teeth, fast and furious. He needs breath, slow and vicious. He needs to feel like his armour is only skin and bones. He’s driven mad by the need to be closer, closer than skin-on-skin contact, closer than the Drift.

Jean needs to be inside his head. Not being in the Drift together is not enough for him. They’ve been stuck in the stasis of unspoken longing for far too long, and Jean needs to _live_.

And so it becomes a crash of lips and panting gasps that has Jean arching his back and pressing his hips into Marco’s with a muffled rumble caught somewhere between Marco’s name and a hiss.

Marco’s hands tangle in Jean’s hair, tugging sharply, and he separates them for a second to gasp, pupils fiercely dilated, before he roughly pulls Jean back against his chest. Their lips collide messily, Jean’s hand slamming against the door with a ringing crash.

There are hands everywhere, his hands, Marco’s hands, hands in the Ghost drift – on his neck, beneath his shirt, down his pants, _plunging inside his chest_.

Marco mouth hurries across his jaw like they’re running out of time; he inflicts purple bruises upon Jean’s neck, biting down upon the lean skin of his shoulder. Jean rubs his thigh up between Marco’s legs. _More, more, it needs to be more–_

“I thought we were gonna die,” he says, his voice hoarse. He fingers scrabble at Marco’s belt, yanking it free of his pants. “You were amazing out there.”

“The Marshal is going to kill us,” Marco breathes. He pulls Jean’s shirt up and over his head, and then his hands are mapping every inch of bare skip, dragging across Jean’s chest and palming hard circles over his scar-littered stomach. The touch-starved feeling surges in Jean’s throat. He feels like he’s overflowing.

 _I want to drown_ , he thinks.

 _So drown_ , Marco replies. He presses his lips to the hollow of Jean’s throat, and Jean’s entire body aches with want. He wants to raise cities from the rubble of the world, and he never wants to die.

* * *

 

**OCTOBER 2, 2018. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

Jean knows that the Marshal would’ve grounded Whiskey Dawn if he had any other choice. He has never seen the man so furious, but he doesn’t mind. It’s easy to suffer the scathing remarks and harsh punishments, even the reformed brutality of Fightmaster Levi in the Kwoon Room, pushing them every day until their muscles scream and burn.

Jean likes the burn. It makes him feel alive, just like frantic kisses and roaming tongues makes him feel alive. _The Drift –_

Well. It goes without saying. Everything compiles within the Drift, balancing on that brilliant point of almost being too much. The feeling is addictive.

Jean wakes before his alarm; it’s still dark outside. Marco’s bare skin peppers with goosebumps, and he shivers in his sleep. He hasn’t slept in his own bed in weeks.

Jean leans across him, grazing his teeth across Marco’s throat, the pulse of Marco’s blood thrilling beneath Jean’s parted lips. That feeling of upmost trust, that intimacy of his teeth upon Marco’s neck, threatens to make him hard again. He slips out of bed before he can entertain the thoughts too long, knowing his resolve is weak in the dark where no-one sees. He knows every minute detail of how it feels for Marco when they touch, when they kiss, when they _fuck_. Everything echoes in the Ghost Drift, bouncing down a corridor only to return just as lucid as it left Jean’s open mouth. It’s too easy to become _obsessed_ by that sort of thing.

Jean steps into his clothes as quietly as he can, debating an early morning run around the base before sunrise. Maybe he’ll stop by Whiskey’s hangar and catch the dawn. Sasha has been working hard on her repairs.

Marco stirs on the bed, rolling over onto Jean’s side of the mattress with a sleepy mumble. His arm flops across the dent in Jean’s pillow, an endearing scowl forming on his features as he seeks Jean’s warmth against the autumnal chill.

“Come back to bed,” he grumbles, patting the mattress lazily with his hand. “It’s too early.”

“I’m going to see Whiskey,” Jean replies, tugging his t-shirt over his head as he wonders to the bedside. He leans down for a chaste kiss on Marco’s cheek, but Marco twists his head up and catches Jean’s lips, clearly more awake that he lets on. Marco’s fingers curl into a fist in the neck of Jean’s shirt.

“It’s too early,” he insists, “I want to work on our Drift today. In bed, ideally. You shouldn’t shirk your duties, Jean. Think what Fightmaster Levi would say.”

“Don’t talk about Levi when you’re trying to get into my pants,” Jean groans, taking Marco’s hand and removing it from his shirt. “It really kills the mood, y’know–”

He’s interrupted by the beep of the PA system, the loudspeaker in the corner of his room flashing with a red light. Jean frowns – does talking about the Fightmaster summon him, somehow? Jean really hopes that’s not the case–

“Whiskey, report to Hangar Floor A for briefing,” says the PA. “Repeat: Whiskey, report to Hangar Floor A for briefing.”

“Briefing?” Marco queries, rolling out of bed clumsily, his bare feet hitting the floor with a dull _thunk_. Jean shrugs on his jacket, admiring the view as Marco hurries around the room, gathering his clothes from the night before, strewn across the floor. “I thought the Marshal wasn’t talking to us? Are we forgiven?”

“Maybe it’s a debriefing,” Jean muses, holding out Marco’s boots for him. “Maybe he’s finally gonna fire us and replace us with some of those up-and-coming cadets he can’t shut up about? Maybe we can finally go on that vacation, huh?”

They take their time sauntering through the hallways to the hangar – Johtun’s hangar, not theirs – Marco happy enough to chat to the J-Techs that they pass, Jean lingering behind him but watching on fondly, happy to just be close.

It’s nice to be taken seriously. The fame and the glory – those were good once – but the respect from their peers is a hundred times better. Whiskey has a kill under her belt. She’s a real soldier now.

The hangar is almost empty, no sign of the Marshal or his brigade. Engineers scurry between the forklifts and welder’s belt, other places to be, other things to do. The recovered fragments of Johtun Apostle litter the hangar floor, some shrouded in sheets, other gathering dust. There has been no attempt to put her back together yet, and that thought sullens Jean’s mood. Even in disrepair, her mighty claws are fifty-feet high, poised and dangerous. It seems a waste to let her waste away.

“Connie mentioned the Marshal has commissioned a Mark V,” Marco says, “Maybe they’ll salvage some of Johtun’s parts. Give her the digital core she deserves.”

 “Four years too late for Ymir,” Jean mutters, absently tapping his fingers against the base of his throat. “She’d be mad. You know she would.”

“Who’d be mad?” comes a chirp, familiar and jesting. Jean and Marco both turn in surprise, but the friends-turned-strangers are not the sight they want to see.

Ymir’s wheelchair squeaks as she wheels herself up to them, her long legs covered in a blanket, and a rue smile stretched thin across her lips. Her hair is down upon her shoulder, greasy and unbrushed, and her skin is pale and sickly.

Krista follows her, protectively hovering over the handles of the chair, which Ymir has clearly told her not to touch, for she _doesn’t need help_. A brutal, ugly scar wraps itself around Krista’s cheeks and down her neck, mutilated and mangled. She walks with a limp.

Jean’s stomach drops out from within him.

“Ymir–”

“Don’t gawp,” she gripes, “It’s nothing you’ve not seen before, you ass.”

“Your legs–”

“They’re gone,” she says sharply, “Well, not gone. They’re still here. Just out of action. Nerve damage. The spinal clamp fried me when that fucker ripped us a new one. Glad to see you two got out of that mess unscathed, though.”

“Will you get better?” Marco asks, nodding at her legs. “You can go to physio, right?”

“Doesn’t really matter anymore,” Ymir says. Her hand comes up to rub across her breast bone, as if soothing an ache in her chest. She casts her eyes to the floor with a solemnity that doesn’t suit. Jean realises that her cancer must have spread. It was the Jaeger that killed her in the end, not the Kaiju, against all odds. “Johtun’s done for. She’s not coming back. I’m sorry, Jean.”

“Sorry?” Jean says, “Why the Hell are you sorry, you moron? Can’t you just–”

“No,” says Krista, “No, Jean. We’re not getting back in the hot seat. Ymir’s done enough, and there are – there are other things I can do. We’re sorry because Whiskey won’t be going to Manila, like she was promised. We need you here, now. Permanently.”

Jean had almost forgotten the promise of long ago: the headliner slot in the new Manila Shatterdome, the first line of defence, the closest drop point to the Breach. Whiskey Dawn was destined for the fray from the moment of her conception.

“I know you liked the glory,” Ymir says, her mouth twisting up into a wry, but defeated, smirk. “I know you’re still a fame-whore, deep, deep down. But it sounds like Wasp or Helios are gonna get the honour instead.”

“I don’t feel that way anymore,” Jean says, and it’s true. He says it with pride, glancing sideways at Marco, who places a reassuring palm in the small of his back. “Besides. Anchorage needs us. No-one else will put up with the cold.”

The truth is simple: he could think of little worse than abandoning the ice-fields of Alaska for the sandy beaches of Manila. He doesn’t want to risk his life, and he doesn’t want to risk Marco’s life, and he knows, selfishly, that Anchorage is as far away from the Breach as they can get. He knows that he needs more than just tomorrow; Marco’s love of living has become him. He needs next week, next month, ten years down the line, and he needs them all in writing.

Sometimes, surviving isn’t about fighting to win. Sometimes, surviving isn’t even about saving the world. Sometimes, it’s about staying far, far away from the danger. About running.

 

* * *

 

There’s a sombre mood hanging like a cloud over the Shatterdome in the days that follow the departure of Ymir and Krista, and the official announcement of Johtun’s decommission. She was the last of the Mark Is still in active service, and it feels as if the Glory Days have died with her, the splendour of the fight lost to the ugly struggle for survival. They’re not winning this war; they’re just coasting.

Krista yields to the interior, returning a hero to her father and the exaltation of the American public. She runs for a position on the defence committee – and gets it, without contest. Jean sees her on the TV sometimes, smiling and waving, but her eyes far away. She zones out mid-interview sometimes, her hand straying to her neck, where the skin is still blistered.

Ymir vanishes. No-one knows where she goes. One day, she’s sitting with Jean and Marco in the canteen, watching Krista on the TV, and the next – she’s just gone. Not a word to anyone. A spectre in the wind that rattles through the hangar eaves, forewarning the arrival of winter.

Jean wanders like a traveller in the Drift. He lingers in the Ghost Drift more often than not, in and out of sleep. He surrounds himself with Marco, and Marco only, blocking out the call of the PA system, Levi’s barking commands, and even the Marshal’s orders.

Sasha is the only one who manages to pry him free.

“You guys are gonna want to see this,” she grins one day, tugging Marco by his sleeve across the hangar floor, Jean trailing behind. “I’ve made some improvements to Whiskey’s itinerary! I think you’ll like them!”

Two panels on Whiskey’s shoulders heave with a hydraulic _whoosh_ , folding open to reveal an artillery of long-range missiles.

“That’s an AKM Shoulder Launcher,” she announces proudly, “And we’ve also kitted you out with some diamond-tipped claws, courtesy of the generosity of our good friend Ymir. Think of it as a little bit of Johtun to carry around with you – that we, we’re not breaking up the old team completely.”

“What do you mean _not_ _breaking up the old team_?” Marco asks, “Has something happened?”

Sasha gazes up at Whiskey, hands on his hips and her expression determined.

“The Marshal has divided up the tech team,” she says, and before Jean and Marco can jump in, she adds, “I’m staying, before you ask. There’s no way in Hell I’m leaving you two idiots alone. But – but Connie’s been transferred. As well as twenty others of my engineers.”

“Sasha, I’m sorry,” Marco laments. Sometimes Jean forgets that once, Connie and Sasha were Marco’s teammates, in much the same way Eren was his. They were just fighting the war on a different side of the coin. “Where have they sent him?”

“That’s the best part,” she muses, shaking her head. “He’s gone to Tokyo. New head of engineering for Atlas Rogue. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it, Jean?”

“Did Armin quit?” Jean can’t help but ask, thinking back to the thin and wiry man who once helped him and Eren suit-up in much the same way Sasha helps him now.

“Apparently,” Sasha says, “He left to join Jaeger Academy, now that PPDC are looking for Mark V pilots. Beat me to the punch. Me and Connie were discussing joining up ourselves. Always figured we’d be Drift Compatible. Can you imagine a Jaeger of our own? I already had so many ideas for names, y’know. Harlequin Blue was my favourite, but then I also liked Artemis Fury, but then _again_ , Connie was a fan of–”

She prattles off, one thousand different names on her tongue – she’s clearing been thinking about it for a long time – and whilst Marco nods along politely, Jean slips away into the quiet of the Ghost Drift.

They were going to get married – that’s what Connie and Sasha said. Another promise for the end of the war not in sight.

First it was Eren, and then it was Ymir and Krista, and now it’s Connie. They’re all gone. It’s easy to believe in patterns: the endless rota of training and sleeping and training and sleeping; the constant trickle of Kaiju through the Breach; the relentless cycle of hope and regret. Jean wonders when it’ll be Sasha, when it’ll be Marco.

Sasha’s words stir within him the realisation that if he and Marco were separated – one of them here, and the other in Tokyo – he wouldn’t cope. It’s no longer a case of it being unpleasant, or painful, or even torturous. All those things could be overcome, with the blessing of time.

Jean just wouldn’t be able to cope. He needs the Drift to function now. He needs Marco’s thoughts inside his head, he needs the constant knowledge of where his partner is at all times, he needs the thoughts, the emotions, the instincts – he needs to know, every hour of every day, that Marco is still breathing. That’s what the Drift partnership means. One part beautiful, and one part wretched, always in equal measure.

As it turns out, fate has a preference between the two.

 

* * *

 

**JANUARY 12, 2019. ANCHOR POINT, 200KM FROM ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

Storms rage across the Cook Inlet as if Poseidon himself has dredged himself out from the depths to referee the charge.

“Sasha!” Jean yells, regaining his balance as a wave smacks into the side of Whiskey, knocking her backwards. Winds outside the Conn-Pod howl like demons, bone-chilling and furious. “Where is this damn Kaiju at?! We’ve been out here almost an hour!”

“The storm is messing with our radios,” Sasha says, her voice scattered by white noise. “Just stay alert. It can’t be more than three hundred metres out.”

“Our radar is all over the place,” Marco says, reaching forward to poke at the screen between him and Jean. He stabs buttons with his gloved wings, but the HUD just trembles, the lights jittering. “We’re flying blind, Sasha! Where is Helios?!”

“On his way!” Sasha says, “The air lift couldn’t get very far up the coast, so he’s on foot! Twenty minutes – _max_!”

“We’re out here alone against a fucking Cat IV,” Jean hisses, stretching out his right arm and flexing his hand. “How can these fucks keep getting bigger, I don’t get it–”

“Weapons system engaged,” says the AI, “Right hemisphere blade: online. Charging.”

“I’ll ready the AKM,” Marco says, “We can blast it when we see it, and ho – _mmph_!”

A great force smacks into Whiskey’s chest, expelling the air from two pairs of lungs made flesh, and one pair made steel. She goes reeling backwards, her feet knocked out from under her, into the thrashing waves.

“Shit,” Jean hisses, his ears ringing as they drag Whiskey back to her feet as water ploughs into her belly, pushing her back, and back again, “Was that a wave? Please tell me it was a wave.”

“Kaiju!” Marco shouts, “Launching AKM!”

Whiskey jerks as the missiles in her shoulder burst free, whizzing through the bray of the storm like bottle rockets, lighting up the dark in an explosion of fire as they make contact with the belly of a beast that emerges from the shadowy depths of the water.

The Kaiju is gargantuan, bigger, bulkier, _angrier_ than any they’ve seen before – the stuff of nightmares. It looks like a dragon, like a shark, like a basilisk: a real monster. Its scaled flesh blazes blue where blood ripples beneath its skin, and upon its heads, a crest, razor-sharp and knife-life and _dangerous_.

The Kaiju throws its head back and roars, its screech the soul of the storm, its fierce claws scrabbling at its chest, knocking away the shells of the missiles as if they were ants. A surge of a wave splatters against its wound, bubbling, grotesque, rinsing it of blood, mixing it with the sea.

Jean raises his fists in defence; Whiskey’s clenched hands come up to shield her face.

“Whiskey!” calls LOCCENT, “Status report! What do you see?”

“Bipedal!” Marco shouts, “Three-hundred – three-fifty foot at least! Our missiles did nothing! Going in with the plasma caster!”

“Let’s go!” Jean shouts, twisting his arm until it lights up, “Eat this, motherfucker!”

Whiskey blasts the Kaiju with a pulse of blue light, and it seems to splatter off the shoulder of the Kaiju, cauterising its flesh but being swallowed up by a terrifying wave. Jean grits his teeth, pushing the plasma caster to its limit as it recharges: three seconds, two seconds –

The Kaiju lunges at them, slamming into Whiskey’s right arm. The plasma caster explodes with blue energy into the Kaiju’s underside, blasting a hole through the flesh. Marco drives left-hand blade into the neck, _again, again, again_ , and the Kaiju thrashes, its claws piercing Whiskey’s hide and tearing out fistfuls of wire from her insides. It coils its lashing tail around her legs, sinking its teeth into her shoulder, spitting out missile shells when it rears backwards, shoving Whiskey into the water.

“Fuck! Get up, Marco, get up!” Jean says, stabbing buttons on the console, “How many rounds to we have left?!”

“Right hemisphere AKM expended,” replies the AI. “Left hemisphere AKM: five rounds.”

The Kaiju rushes them again, driving through the tormented sea with the blade upon its head, powering into Whiskey’s belly as she tries to stand, winding her. A Jaeger’s anguish is hydraulic groans and pneumatic gasps, matching Jean grunt for grunt in pain, as he lashes out with the right hand blade, plunging the red laser into the Kaiju’s jaw.

“It’s not taking damage!” Marco calls, “Jean just got a headshot, and it’s not going down!”

“Helios is almost there, hold on, Whiskey!” shouts LOCCENT.

“We are holding on!” Jean yells, Whiskey locking her arm around the Kaiju’s neck, so that Jean can drive his blade into its head a second time, and then a third– “Literally! Give me something good already!”

“Go for the spinal cord!” Sasha hollers, “Back of the neck, a few feet beneath the skin! Immobilise it!”

Jean crumples when the Kaiju drives its claw into Whiskey’s side, his entire right side going numb; he wheezes in pain. Whiskey rumbles, an earthquake spasming through her very wires, and then, deep within the Drift, she screams.

“What was that?!” Jean cries.

“Our back-up generator!” Marco says, staring in horror as the HUD lights up in violent red, squawking critical damage. “It just ripped it straight out of us! Jean!”

“Alright! Let’s make this count, then!”

The Kaiju’s claws tear into the Conn-Pod then, and sparks reign down upon Jean and Marco as they’re ripped open to the elements. The storm tears through the cockpit, ripping wires out of the walls, control panels blown off hinges by the expulsion of force erupting from the Conn. The stench of ammonia is suddenly putrid, red-hot up Jean’s nostrils and down his throat. Shards of metal, saltwater spray, the inconsolable, unbearable screech of the monster from the depths of Hell– it all slams into his Drivesuit at once.

Jean twists the blade in his fist, driving it up into the Kaiju’s throat with all the force he can manage, a battle cry ripped from his lungs, raw and ragged. The violent jerk of the Conn-Pod has him seeing double, his insides mush, his head pounding, and he feels Whiskey _bleeding_ , her agony, _his_ agony, eviscerating–

“Marco! Plasma caster! Marco! Empty the clip!”

“Jean–!”

The Kaiju slashes at them again, but this time, its claw sears through the naked hole in the Conn-Pod, its talons hooking around Marco’s feedback cradle – and it _yanks_.

Marco Bodt is torn from the Drift like a plaster from an unhealed cut, sudden and all at once. The splinters impale Jean from every which side, through his legs, through his lungs, through his vocal chords as he tries to scream – Marco! Marco! MARCO! – the Kaiju tearing Marco from Whiskey’s gaping wound with a burst of excruciating, mind-numbing pain, flinging him wide and into the dark of the sea.

“Marco!” Jean screeches, “Marco! No! No! Marco!”

The Kaiju roars and the Earth shakes in fear. Marco is gone. The Drift has shattered. It’s happening all again – _Marco! Marco! Marco!_

The circuitry suit burns into his skin – his helmet fills with the reek of charring flesh – his head is splintering, he’s falling apart, he’s disintegrating –

Blood in his mouth. Every nerve in his body is on fire, the pain greater than any pain he’s ever felt, scorching, _incinerating_ – his arm, _he can’t feel his arm_ , even though he knows it’s there, he can see it, God dammit–

The Kaiju barrels into Whiskey and he’s flung forwards, all the air in his lungs expelled in a violent gasp – _can’t breathe, can’t breathe, Marco_ – and then it’s there again, the monster, its claws piercing the Conn-Pod, trying to tear back the metal, its eyes – its damn, blue eye, staring at him through the hole in the cockpit – right there, _right fucking there_ –

 _Weapons system engaged_ , he hears inside his head, somewhere, somehow, amidst the roaring hurricane. _Fire at will._

His fist clenches. Electric blue lights up the dark like lightning, again and again and again– spend the clip, use it all, kill the beast – _oh God, my head, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts_ – hot, oozing blood rains down on him – he chokes on it–

_I will kill them all!_

Everything goes black. And then it goes white, and Jean thinks he must’ve died.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Jaegers featured in this are all original: Whiskey Dawn (Jean, Marco), Johtun Apostle (Ymir, Krista), Atlas Rogue (Jean (previously), Eren, Mikasa), Eden Spirit (Erwin, Levi), Corinthian Wasp (Annie, Hitch), Helios Shrike (Reiner, Bert), Howler Foxtrot (Mike, Nanaba), and Harlequin Blue (unnamed, but in my head, that’s flown by Armin and his grandpa). All the Jaeger names were specifically chosen for symbolism, so go figure. 
> 
> Actually, there’s a buttload of symbolism in this fic.


	4. requiem for the electric dream

**JANUARY 15, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

The first thing he sees is white tiles. White tiles, grubby around the edges, hit hard with artificial, yellow light.

Next comes the smell of bleach, sharp and clinical, strong enough to burn the inside of his nose. He screws up his face in disgust; he can still do that.

Then, he hears voices, muddled at first, faint and distant, as if he were listening through a locked door or from beneath a heavy, winter blanket.

“I don’t care what the Marshal says,” he hears – a female voice, a familiar voice, a voice he knows has never sounded so point-blank furious. “They’re God-damn _people_ , not Jaegers! No, no – I am not talking about this right now! Screw protocol! Jean hasn’t even woken up yet, and you’re acting like – no. No. I’m not letting anyone speak to him until he’s a) awake and b) informed of the situation. His head has taken a beating we’ll never understand. We should be relieved he’s just alive – not many people fly solo, kill a Kaiju, and are still breathing after–”

It’s Sasha. She must be on the phone.

Jean tries to move his arms to get her attention, but his body is leaden, concrete poured into his veins and left to set. Nothing reacts the way he wants, and he grunts in frustration.

A shadow falls across his face, and it takes his eyes a moment to focus on the face of a young woman – a doctor, judging by the white lab coat and the stethoscope around her neck. She’s holding a pen light in her hand, waving it back and forth across his eyes.

“Mister Kirschtein,” she says, “I need you to follow my torch with your eyes. You’re in a hospital in Anchorage. You’ve been asleep for a few days – you’ve suffered massive physical and mental trauma and we needed to keep you under sedation whilst we patched you up. Can you tell me what the last thing you remember is?”

“Hospital–?” Jean croaks, finding his voice hoarse. “Why am in a hospital–?”

He cranes his neck and it seizes in pain, tumbling out as a guttural cry over his lips. His eyes prick with saltwater.

“You have to stay still,” says the doctor, pinning him down by his shoulders. Even just a touch aches beyond recompense. Jean grits his teeth and growls. “Please, Mister Kirschtein. You’ve got a concussion, severe burns, and you suffered a minor brain haemorrhage. Three of your ribs are broken, and you’ve got hairline fractures up and down both your tibias and fibulas – you have to stay still.”

“Sasha–” he finds himself saying. “I can hear … Sasha.”

The doctor looks to the side, beyond his field of vision, and waves at someone he cannot see. A door opens and closes again, and he hears feet quick on a tiled floor.

And then Sasha floods into his vision, too brisk and too sudden, her hair falling out of her ponytail, her eyes reddened and puffy with tears, and a tissue stuffed up her crusty nose, soaked with boogers. But – she’s grinning.

“What happened to you?” Jean says weakly, squinting up at her. “You’re a damn wreck.”

“You should see yourself, you idiot,” she sniffles, “You looks like a snowman with your legs all cast up like that.”

“My throat hurts,” Jean says, coughing dryly. He tastes something metallic in his mouth; it tastes like death. “And my head. It fucking kills, like there’s a vice on my temples or somethin’.”

“I’ll try and get them to up your morphine dose,” Sasha says, reaching up to smooth his hair back from his face. Her palm is clammy and sweaty and doesn’t feel good. “I’m sure we can pull a few strings for a lunatic like you. Solo-piloting your beat ass twenty miles up the coastline – I wouldn’t believe it if I weren’t the one who answered the call-in when they found you–”

“Solo?” Jean croaks, “What the Hell are you talking ‘bout? Has the Marshal been around?”

Sasha’s expression changes in a blink from a relieved smile to dawning horror. She turns, searching for the doctor.

“Is amnesia something that could happen?” she asks pointedly, “After massive head trauma?”

“Yes, it’s possible,” says the doctor, reappearing on the edges of Jean’s fuzzy vision. He doesn’t like the tone in either of their voices. Something’s not right. “Mister Kirschtein, can you tell me the last thing you remember?”

The last thing he remembers?

Marco had been reading to him from the Iliad again, and then the Kaiju alert had interrupted them, lights strobing all red and green across his room. Kaiju, category IV – heading for Anchorage.

The Marshal said they were going to intercept it at Anchor Point, guard the entrance to the Cook Inlet, stop it from coming inland. Sasha had met them in the Drivesuit Room, Marco had kissed him in front of all the technicians before they put their helmets on, Jean had felt that same pang of fear that has been plaguing him for months – _what if this is the day that the people I care about die?_

The Kaiju – it had a head like a knife, Jean thought it looked a bit like a shark – and then Whiskey had –

Tentatively, Jean probes for the Ghost Drift, but all he finds is vacuous silence. There’s nothing. It’s just _gone_.

“Jean–” Sasha starts.

He sees the flash of a plasma caster, hears the ringing sound of ripping metal, tastes Kaiju Blue as it drowns him–

“Sasha – where’s Marco?”

–hears screams wrenched from his lips, and sees Marco flung from the Conn-Pod like a pebble into the raging torrent of the sea.

Oh God. _Oh God_.

Every bone in his body screams in agony, and maybe he’s crying out too, maybe it’s slicing up his throat good and bloody, maybe he’s terrifying every other patient in this hospital –

The Drift! The Drift is gone and he can feel – he can feel all the pain, all the anger, all the grief, and yet – nothing. There’s no Marco, there’s no _soul_ , there’s just a gaping wound in his head, tattered edges and oozing blood, and beyond it – _is fucking nothing_.

“Jean!” Sasha cries, one knee up on his bedside, pressing her weight down onto his shoulders, pinning him to his pillow as best she can without leaning on his bandaged chest. “Jean! Calm down! You’re going to rip your stitches! Calm down!”

He meets her eyes, deranged and manic and _wild_. Panic reflects straight back at him.

“Where’s Marco, Sasha?!” he shakes, “Where’s Marco, damnit?!”

“I’m going to have to sedate him again, before he hurts himself,” says the doctor. She has a needle in her hand, and she’s injecting it into his IV. Jean’s heart threatens to burst straight out of his chest.

“Sasha!” he cries, desperate, “Sasha?! Please!”

He feels the effect of the sedative almost instantly, wriggling through his skin like a worm, masking the pain and the anger with a hazy, lethargic fog. He feels tears roll all the way down his cheek and across his neck, staining the collar of his hospital gown.

“Sasha,” he pleads, before sleep becomes him. “ _Please!_ ”

Sasha seems to decide something, looking at the doctor, and then out the door, and then finally at Jean. Something settles in her eyes, unreadable. She leans forward, knocking her forehead against Jean’s forehead, imparting her warmth unto him.

With her eyes closed, she says, quickly, “They found him washed up on a beach ten miles south of you, by some miracle of God, still alive. They have him in intensive care right now; he’s been in an out of surgery. He’s lost his _arm_ , Jean, and about half the blood in his body. He’s had to have skin grafts. They have him in a medically-induced coma to stop the pain.”

“I need to see him,” Jean murmurs weakly, struggling weakly against her weight. “I need to … to …”

“You need to sleep,” she says. “Get better. That’s an order.”

 

* * *

 

**JANUARY 17, 2018. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

Only a handful of Jaeger pilots have ever flown solo, and only two of them have ever lived to tell the tale. Fightmaster Levi Ackermann is one of them, and now Jean is the other.

It comes back to him in fits and spurts, moments of the night of the drop, of Marco in his bed, and them tracing lazy patterns over one another’s skin. He grasps fragments of the fight, of the hum of Whiskey’s blades in the dark, of the sea surging up around her legs.

He can’t hold on long, because it all becomes Marco’s screams, _his_ screams, the moment when the Conn-Pod tore open replaying over and over and over again inside his head until he wants to tear his skull open and get it _out_.

Sasha tells him that he suffered a brain haemorrhage when the Drift broke and they were catapulted out of alignment. She says it’s hard to know what happened after that, because comms went dead and to LOCCENT’S eyes, Whiskey went dead.

But she says that Jean suffered the neural load alone, the burden four-fold to what he was used to alongside Marco, and that he had ploughed the entire clip of his plasma caster into the face of the Kaiju, obliterating it. He then walked twenty miles up the coastline alone – and apparently, he has the scars from his circuitry suit to prove it – before Whiskey collapsed on a beach halfway between here and Hell.

The burns and the broken bones aren’t the extent of it, either. Blood has crusted around his nose and eyes, and Sasha helps him gently wash it off with a damp sponge after he refuses to be close to anyone he doesn’t know. When he coughs, he coughs up this blue vapour that stings his lips like acid, and he knows there’s Kaiju Blue inside his lungs, ingrained into his insides. The doctor tells him sombrely that it’s damaged his liver beyond repair, and that he can’t hope on a transplant, the Kaiju Blue elsewhere in his body willing to overrun any foreign object introduced to try and save his life. He loses moments to the darkness, minutes missing here and there, the clock on the wall darting forward by sixty seconds or so every couple of hours. Micro-seizures, the clipboard at the end of his bed reads. Consequence of the leftover electrical impulses still doing laps around his body. They don’t know when it’ll subside – his system was flooded with information in the blink of an eye.

It’s still not the worst – none of it is. Physical pain is nothing. It’s the turmoil inside his head that is unbearable, and he swears it’s going to drive him mad before he ever gets out of his damn hospital bed.

The bond between Jaeger pilots is more than personal, more than emotional, more than letters in a book or words on a page can describe; it’s a _person_ , someone else’s entire self, shoved inside your head. Being a Jaeger pilot is more than just making room for that person. It’s about changing your whole world view to accommodate them, shuffling things around in your head until you don’t just fit, you meld, and you can no longer draw a line between what was yours and what was theirs. It’s about the most intimate form of trust: inviting them into your head and trusting them not to mess it up, whilst being secretly hopeful that they might do just that, the electricity of their touch shamefully addictive.

Having that person be pulled from your head in a moment of nightmarish madness is, in short, the most brutal form of torture. Jean has lost part of himself. His safety net, his barricade to the things he fought so hard to subdue, his partner, his best friend, _the man he loves_. All gone, in a puff of smoke stained red with the blood of men and robotic souls alike.

He manages to find the remnants of the Ghost Drift after a while – his half of it at least, hanging limply like the stub of an arm inside his head, still dripping blood and twitching where nerves have been sawn in two. Jean relives the pain of the Drift breaking over and over again; he feels the shredding, the burning, the panic of water filling up his lungs and drowning him. He has Sasha bring him a mirror when the doctor confines him to his bed and a catheter, forbidding him from even considering the bathroom and a proper shower until his skin has begun to heal – and he looks at himself hard. The shell of a man who stares back is bloody and disgusting and broken. There are ghosts in his eyes, and little else.

They eventually give him a wheelchair – although he’s not sure who _they_ are, beyond the assholes who are keeping him locked up in his room and away from Marco. He only trusts Sasha – she’s all he has left in the world, and he practically snarls when the doctor tries to grab the handles of his chair.

“He’s in really bad shape,” Sasha tells him as she wheels him down the corridor of the ICU. The hospital is like a ghost town – it is Anchorage, for Christ’s sake – which is more than adequate. It feels like he’s stumbling through a non-reality, and he needs to wake up. Wake up to the cold chill in his room and the condensation that sometimes forms on the metal walls and the rise and fall of Marco’s chest beside him as Marco reaches out in his sleep to pull Jean against him, nose nuzzling into the crook of Jean’s neck.

“I can’t believe these assholes haven’t let me see him yet,” Jean grumbles, but it’s all for show. Inside, he’s falling apart, and that’s just the half of it. “I’m his partner. I should be at his side.”

“Not sure if it slipped your notice, but you’re not in great shape yourself,” Sasha remarks, “Seriously, take it easy. The Marshal is already on my case about when you’ll be coming back. I don’t want to _actually_ give him an answer. I haven’t even told him you’re up and about yet.”

 

* * *

 

 

Marco looks like a corpse. There’s no other way to say it. He lies in the hospital bed as if he’s dead, his skin grey and sickly-looking, food for flies, flat on his back with his arm limp at his side. He doesn’t move, hardly breathing as it is.

Jean’s eyes are immediately drawn to the bandaged stump where Marco’s right arm once was. It’s wrong. It’s _so_ wrong. He touched Jean with that hand once, in all the ways decent people don’t speak about.

He must’ve fallen one hundred feet out of their Jaeger and into the sea. One hundred feet, and then washed up upon the beach, only to lie there for what was probably _hours_ – and still he clung on. Jean would feel proud of him, if it weren’t for the despair killing him as a pathogen in his gut.

“Wheel me closer,” Jean tells Sasha, his voice gruff and threatening on tears again. (And worse – he knows for a fact that they’re _his_ tears, and no-one else’s.) “I want to talk to him.”

Sasha does as he says, pushing him up to Marco’s bedside. Jean leans forward in his chair, every newly-healed scar across his stomach whining in pain, and grabs Marco’s left hand. His skin is far too cold.

“You fucking hero,” he says fondly, rubbing his thumb over Marco’s knuckles. “No-one else would’ve survived that.  I told you all that useless nobility would get you killed, and you just had to make sure you proved me wrong, huh?”

Marco breathes in and out, the rhythmic beeping of his cardiogram not changing. Jean doesn’t know if he was expecting a reaction – but he was hoping for one.

“When are they gonna wake him up?” Jean asks, looking back at Sasha over his shoulder. Sasha stares pointedly at her feet.

“They’ve already tried,” she says, scuffing the floor with her boot. “He won’t wake up. We just have to wait – and hope.”

 

* * *

 

**JANUARY 21, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

Marco doesn’t wake up. Jean remains at his bedside, losing hours, losing days, but the nights are so long now that he doesn’t really know where one day ends and the next day starts. Beyond the window seems to be a perpetual twilight, grey and miserable, the clouds unrelenting in their dumping of snow upon the streets.

He suffers without the Drift, reliving the horror of the accident in unannounced flashes that leave him curled up on the floor and clutching his head in agony when the nurses find him. The bones in his legs begin to set, and they let him use crutches to get about, saying something about how moving around will help him get better (a far cry from what they said the week before where he was imprisoned to his bed) – but all he does is use them to hop from his room to Marco’s twice a day.

Even as his body gets better, _he_ doesn’t. He likens the feeling to overcoming an addiction, going cold turkey after years abusing the same drug – except there doesn’t seem to be much sign of _overcoming;_  his synapses still crave the Drift, and he exists in a perpetual state of cold sweats, migraines, and vomiting up what little he eats into the toilet basin.

There are the hallucinations too – but he tries not to let the doctors and nurses see those. Sometimes, when he wakes, Marco will be standing over him, smiling, and he’ll climb into Jean’s bed and they’ll hold each other until the end of the world – only for Jean to awake brutally, cold and alone. Sometimes, it’s Whiskey there, in his room somehow, and sometimes it’s Ymir and Krista, battered and broken. Sometimes it’s Eren, and he laughs at Jean, before shoving him playfully in the shoulder, telling him haughtily that _he’s a fucking idiot for getting back in a Jaeger after him_.

Sometimes, it’s just a Kaiju.

When that happens, he steals away into Marco’s room, dodging the scrutiny of the nurses who look at him with a mix of sympathy and irritation, and finds no solace until he holds his hand, leaning across his bed to plant a kiss on his lips.

It always feels like kissing a dead person. It never really works. He needs the Drift. He needs to know Marco’s still in there. He needs to escape from this purgatory.

 

* * *

 

**JANUARY 24, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

“Hey, Marco. At the end of it, let’s not go to Tokyo. I want to get as far away from the sea as possible. Let’s go somewhere wide and open and _land-locked_. I want to feel inconsequential. I’ve had enough of mattering. I want to – I want to feel the Drift in open space.”

 

* * *

 

**JANUARY 25, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

“I was thinking. I want to buy a house. Somewhere far away from everyone else. I was thinking Wyoming, maybe. Or Utah. Or I guess Vermont, if I miss the snow. You can live there too, of course. We’ll invite Ymir and Krista, and Connie and Sasha ‘round sometimes, and get completely shit-faced in the back yard, and light up fireworks on the Fourth of July that will be seen for miles.”

 

* * *

 

**FEBRUARY 6, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

 “Y’know, the sun was out today. First time I’ve seen it in weeks. I went out onto the balcony and I stood on the railings – yeah, I know. It was dumb and dangerous. But like – for a minute I realised I was the same height as Whiskey, all the way up there. And I thought: _I could just step out into the air_. Not because I wanted to kill myself – that’s what the nurses will tell you, okay, so you can’t believe them – but because I just forgot. I thought we were still there. You and me, up in the Conn-Pod. You and me and Whiskey.”

 

* * *

 

**FEBRUARY 14, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

“I really need you, Marco. I really – _fuck_. Fuck.”

 

* * *

 

**FEBRUARY 15, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

Jean is discharged the day after Valentine’s Day, because _of course he is_. It doesn’t really make a difference, because he’s still at Marco’s bedside, just without his own down the corridor.

Sasha comes to see him, bringing with her a massive pile of manila envelopes and an apology that she couldn’t keep the Marshal at bay indefinitely. She puts them on the sideboard in Marco’s room, and Jean doesn’t touch them.

“I – also brought you something else,” she then says, sliding over to the window and closing the blinds. “It’s … not exactly protocol, but you know me, I–”

She cuts herself off, it too much a struggle for even her to be unchecked in her happiness. She presses her lips into a thin line, crouching down to tug a canvas bag from her backpack. She digs around inside, and what she pulls out is all too familiar to Jean. It’s half an old Pons System: two neural interfaces connected by a bundle of coiled wire.

“I figured it would help,” Sasha admits, holding it out to him. “I couldn’t bring it all, but – but c’mon. It’s me. Hospital generators have no defences I can’t crack.”

They wait until the nurse has done her round and pressed fluids into Marco’s veins, and then Jean’s locking the door with more energy than he’s felt in weeks, and Sasha’s jimmying around with a plug socket she’s pulled out of the wall to reveal a mess of multi-coloured wires.

Jean wiggles onto the bed next to Marco and fits one of the Pons’ headsets to Marco’s forehead, taking care to attach the suction cups to his forehead. Sasha hands Jean the matching headset, and he slips it on with shaky fingers.

“It might not work,” she says, “If he’s brain dead. There’ll be nothing to see. No Drift. It’ll just be you, but amplified four-fold. You'll be deafening.”

“I know,” Jean says, “But I have to try. I’m desperate. I need to talk to him.”

Jean closes his eyes, and waits. He tries to clear his mind, but it’s hard, trauma clawing at his edges and goading him with a wicked laugh. He scrunches up his eyes, tries to focus harder.

 _Marco_ , he calls out. _Marco?_

There’s no reply, but what Jean does feel is the lash of gentle waves against his feet, and when he looks down, he’s not in a hospital anymore, he’s standing on a beach somewhere hot and humid, and _he’s in the Drift_.

Peace washes over him like the tide, every ebb and flow of the sea sweeping away his grubby thoughts and cleansing his skin.

He hears joyous laughter then, the giggle of a child, and the voice of a woman – and he looks up just as a mother emerges from the sea, carrying a small, soaked little boy in her arms, the both of them alight in giddy smiles.

They don’t see Jean. They can’t see Jean, more likely.

The mother is beautiful, with her deep, sun-tanned skin, and her mane of wild black hair. She has bright eyes, dark and molasses-brown, and freckles across the bridge of her nose and high across her cheeks.

The little boy is clearly Marco – Jean would recognise him anywhere, would _know_ him anywhere – and he can’t be more than five years old. His hair is still a mop and his grin still feels like the sun, and Jean feels a lurch in his chest as he watches little Marco run around upon the sand, his mother chasing him with cries of _oh, Marco, I’m going to gobble you all up_!

The irony isn’t lost.

 

* * *

 

The Drift becomes Jean’s only escape from the torment of being awake. He counts down the hours until the nurses clock off, and then he’s in Marco’s room, setting up the Pons and leaping into the space between souls without pause for breath – because it’s more important than breath, more important than _breathing_.

Every time it’s different. Sometimes it’s memories of Peru from Marco’s childhood, memories of his older sisters spoiling him rotten, memories of his mother before she got sick. Sometimes, it’s San Francisco, and Jean watches the feeling of pride swell in Marco’s chest with every good exam result or well-received essay. Sometimes, he sees himself, bare white skin in the dark of his room, breathy gasps punctuated by Marco’s kisses, and Jean feels like a voyeur, watching them do these things from the shadows, reliving the white-hot simper of a mouth on his inner thigh, or the feeling of fingers inside him, or the unabashed whimper in his throat as he comes – three times that night. Jean remembers it well, and apparently, so does Marco.

He can never interact with the memories, however hard he tries. He’ll try to call out to little Marco on the beach, or he’ll try and bump into teenage Marco on the street in San Francisco, or he’ll reach out and trace the back of Marco as he leans over another Jean, pressing him into the mattress.

Marco’s thoughts run circles around him, clear and bright – and maybe there’s some relief on the faces of the doctors and nurses when they inevitably catch Jean in the Drift, and he tells them that Marco’s not brain dead, far from it, _he’s still in there, damn it_ – but Jean can’t communicate. It’s a one-way telephone line, or perhaps a television screen, where the characters can move him to tears, but when he reaches out his fingers to touch, all he finds is static. He’s the audience.

The doctors let him continue Drifting. They don’t really have a choice – he snaps at them, doesn’t let any of them near Marco until they agree to his demands. He knows this aggression; he’s reverted to a previous model of himself, the one without Marco probing curiously at the inside of his head.

 _You’re going to kill yourself if you keep this up_ , Eren says.

 _Like you would care_ , Jean replies.

_Of course I care. I’m the only person in the world who knows even remotely what it feels like. Who else has your messed-up head managed to Drift with?_

_I miss him. I need him to wake up. I’m scared. It hurts. Worse than before._

_I know it does._

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 5, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

The Marshal comes to see him a year to the day of his last drop in Atlas Rogue. It’s funny how things work out. That’s what Sasha likes to say. Jean’s not sure he can believe in coincidences anymore.

“Professor Hanji told me that they were missing an old Pons System from the inventory,” the Marshal says. Jean’s not even on his feet, slumped at Marco’s side, the headset in his lap. He feels no desire to stand and salute the Marshal today. “I should’ve expected this.”

“I need it,” Jean spits, defensively. He feels like a cornered animal, and the Marshal is here to take him away, dragging him hissing and growling by his collar, back to the kennels. “If I’m awake, I have to relive it. Again and again. It doesn’t end.”

“You have Drift Sickness,” the Marshal says, “You’re addicted to the Drift, and it’s hampering both yours and his recovery. You know that, Ranger. The neural strain you’re placing on him – and on yourself – is going to drive you both to an early grave.”

“Maybe that’s what I want.”

“You don’t get to make that choice, Ranger.”

Jean glares at the Marshal, but he seems impervious to it, his blue eyes like the sea at storm, unaffected by one, desperate man screaming at the hurricane.

“The war still has need of you,” the Marshal says, low. “Orders have been issued for your transfer from Anchorage.”

“What?” Jean hisses, “You’re joking, right? I need to be here. Marco needs me, Whiskey needs me, I’m her pilot–”

“Yes, you are,” the Marshal says. “Her _only_ pilot. She’s out of commission until Mister Bodt wakes up, and we have no idea when that will be. He might not even be fit to pilot. It’s a waste of resources we cannot afford – especially a man of your skillset. Rangers have been falling to the wayside more frequently in these days of late, Mister Kirschtein, if you've cared to notice.”

“I should’ve never woken up,” Jean mutters.

“Perhaps,” says the Marshal, “We’re moving you back to Tokyo. Miss Ackermann has had to take a leave of absence, and we cannot afford to leave South East Asia unprotected, so close to the Breach. Atlas Rogue needs a second pilot, and as I understand it, you are the only one who fits the bill.”

Jean feels angry – more angry than he has ever felt before. He leaps to his feet and the Pons System goes clattering to the floor as he makes a lunge for the Marshal, trying to grab the lapels of the man’s jacket, to scream in to his face, to tell him –

“There’s no way in Hell I’m going back to Atlas,” Jean growls, “You will have to drag me kicking and screaming.”

“You have a choice, Mister Kirschtein. It’s Tokyo, or it’s the Wall. I’ll leave it up to you,” says the Marshal. “This war is bigger than you. I urge you to get better. You fly out tomorrow at dawn.”

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 6, 2019. ALASKA REGIONAL HOSPITAL, ANCHORAGE, ALASKA.**

Jean stays with Marco all night, deep within the Drift. That night’s showing is the moments after they arrived back from Los Angeles, Jean slamming Marco up against the door, all rage and lust and despair as he kissed him senseless. That was the first night that Jean felt skin-on-skin contact could be a rival for the Drift; they’d held each other so tight in his bed, so desperate not to let go, so in love, that Jean had wondered: _have any pilots ever been this connected?_ and he still wonders it, watching the memory back.

He wakes with rasping cries in his ears, the feel of pliable skin beneath his fingers, a subtle heat in his abdomen – and the cold, starch white of hospital walls is the cruellest of realities. Marco sleeps on, unmoved by the things going on inside his head.

Jean sits with his forehead pressed against Marco’s knuckles until they come for him, the Marshal and his entourage of blank faces. Sasha is there too – she’d offered to go to Jean’s room and pack his stuff for him – and in her arms she’s holding his leather jacket, the one with Whiskey Dawn printed on the back.

She holds it out to him, but Jean shakes his head.

“Leave it here,” he says, “I don’t need it. Marco will. It gets cold in here at night.”

He takes the jacket and splays it over Marco’s chest, so that the sheepskin collar tickles the underside of his stubbled jaw.

“Wake up,” he urges, one last time. “Just wake up.”

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 8, 2019. TOKYO SHATTERDOME, JAPAN.**

No-one Drifts with Eren Jaeger without a toll. Mikasa Ackermann – the golden girl, the impossible pilot, the solider who Jean was once told was calm and collected and brought so little into the Drift – was not immune to that insidious anger.

Now, she carries too much. She had chased the RABIT. It had only been a training exercise, between Atlas and the newly-imported Wasp in Hong Kong, but she’d gone tumbling down the rabbit hole, desperately trying to pull Carla Jaeger out of the rubble before she was devoured. It had been like flipping a switch. Suddenly, the burden had become too much, and try as she might, they could not Drift again.

Jean almost feels sorry for them. He knows how that can feel.

It’s almost cherry blossom season in Tokyo; the trees are budding with pink hearts. The bay smells like fish, seeping into the Shatterdome from the harbour-side markets, made all the worse by the humidity. The air is so wet and muggy, Jean can feel it condensing upon his Alaska-chapped lips.

Connie Springer greets him on the air strip. He’s shaved his head right down to the bone, but still walks with an excitable skip in his step. He wastes no time in swallowing Jean up in a brawl of a hug.

“My man,” Connie says, “You don’t even know how good it is to see a friendly face. Everyone here is so _serious_!”

“I’m probably about to disappoint you, then,” Jean replies.

Connie slaps him on the back, in what Jean thinks is meant to be reassurance.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me, dude,” he says cheerfully, “It sucks what’s happened. I totally feel for you. Sending you here – that’s cruel. What are the doctors saying?”

“Nothing,” Jean mumbles, “They know nothing. And now he’s alone, too.”

“My girl Sasha will have your back,” Connie says, slinging his arm around Jean’s shoulders casually, “I telecomm’d her this morning, and she was already at the hospital. Tells me she’s gonna try and make visiting hours every day. She ain’t got nothing else to do – not ‘til the Mark Vs come in, at least.”

 

* * *

 

Jean expects a heraldous moment when he finally runs into Eren Jaeger. He expects resentful silence, or maybe awkward side-stepping around what should or shouldn’t be addressed, or even explosions – maybe they’ll fall straight into an argument with all the things that were left unsaid and left to fester into something ugly.

He finds him in the Shatterdome canteen. Jean’s walking in, and Eren’s walking out, and they stop, they freeze, the whole world pauses on its axis for one, unreadable moment.

And then Eren hugs him. He throws his arms around Jean’s shoulders and squeezes him, pressing his nose into Jean’s neck, and it’s all Jean can do to fist his hands in Eren’s shirt and hold on tight.

“I’m so sorry,” Eren is saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

 

* * *

 

Their Ghost Drift is still there, weak and withered, but there. When Jean tugs on it, it feels like it might snap, its elasticity perished across the months.

Eren tells him that he felt it all in glimpses. Jean’s always been in his head, somewhere in the corner, tucked away and offering the odd, scathing remark every time Eren did something stupid – but he’d grown fainter in the recent weeks.

Eren had seen Marco, the face of someone he didn’t know and had never met, in flashes. He’d felt pangs of grief and regret not his own, following the worldwide announcement of Johtun Apostle’s decommission. He’d woken up in cold and feverish sweats the night Whiskey had collapsed on that beach, Jean’s name on his lips, without knowing why.

 _And now_ , he says, as he and Jean are sat at a canteen table late into the night, and the world around them is deserted, _I feel your pain. I think I might be a little in love with Marco too, after all the damn stuff you’ve let seep into my head! I haven’t been right for ages._

 _Is that why Mikasa slipped out?_ Jean asks, _Do you think?_

_Probably. I’m sorry you got dragged back here to make up for my mistakes. Again._

_It’s nothing I’m not used to._

They both know that’s a lie.

 

* * *

 

Eren is the same as he ever was: reckless, impulsive, horrendously brave. He’s selfless, persevering, and vigorously determined in everything he does, from beating the living _shit_ out of the punch bags in the Kwoon, to trying to steal Connie’s rice at supper, despite Connie being a far less willing target than Atlas’ old chief tech, Armin. Jean’s old life paints itself in the colours of Deja-vu, from the way Eren still wants to fight everyone who looks at him wrong, to the white-walled, all-plastic room he’s given as his own space, to the way Atlas Rogue looks, standing tall in the hangar.

Atlas. She has more bruises than Jean remembers, more dents in her armour, more scuffs in her paint. She’s aged badly. She really does look like a Ford Capri. 

Jean knows he has moved on, so little of the person he is now is Tokyo, and so much of it is Alaska. So much of him is Marco. He knows he doesn’t belong here. It's like he's wandering through the past, a spectre out of another world. 

“You see this scar?” Eren says, tapping a pale streak in his skin along his jaw line. “You gave me this. The day we went to Shanghai, and you beat the living shit out of me. Do you remember?”

“Yeah. I remember.”

 

* * *

 

**MARCH 12, 2019. TOKYO SHATTERDOME, JAPAN.**

Jean barely has time to catch his breath before the powers that be are telling him to get inside a Jaeger again. Atlas’s armour feels all shades of sickening, cutting into his skin and squeezing him in all the wrong places. The plates of the Drivesuit rub awkwardly upon his stomach, irritating the skin he wears, criss-crossed with circuitry scars. The helmet presses too hard upon his temples, the ever-present migraine he suffers made all the worse by the pressure.

He wonders for a moment if he and Eren are still Drift Compatible – but they are. Eren has this uncanny ability to Drift with a lot of people – it’s just that not many people can Drift with him in return.

“Prepare for neural handshake, guys,” Connie says over the comms. “Starting in ten seconds. Nine ... eight ... seven, six, five–”

Jean thinks of Marco. How can he not?

 “Pilot-to-pilot connection: protocol sequence,” says Atlas’ AI. “Neural handshake initiated.”

Eren barrels into him so fast that the wind is knocked out of him. He’d forgotten – he’d forgotten what it’s like, how it’s a fight, a scrap, a collision of two semi-trucks going seventy miles an hour down the highway, to get inside Eren’s head.

There’s so much chaos. Jean knows the anger, the regret, the grief – but all those things can be compressed and compartmentalised. (He’s been made to talk to enough shrinks to know this stuff). It’s the chaos that Eren carries into the Drift that makes him harmful. It’s like trying to throw your arms around a hurricane – impossible.

“Right side hemisphere in alignment,” Connie says, “Left side is slipping. Jean, you alright in there?”

Of course he’s not. He sees the RABIT dancing in front of him, daring him to chase it. It convulses like a creature distorted into unearthly shapes, and howls a screech made from Jean’s and Marco’s and the Kaiju’s own.  Jean feels the pain searing beneath his skin, rummaging around inside his veins, bursting his blood vessels like tiny fireworks. He looks down, and his Drivesuit is splattered with Kaiju Blue, simmering and steaming, and then, he looks up, and the feedback cradle next to him is empty, all ripped wires and spewing sparks, the blustery sea beating against his face, smearing salt and water across his visor–

 _Jean, let me see_ , says Eren. _Let’s make it a fixed point. It’ll stop you from chasing._

Why is Eren Jaeger the one giving him advice? When did the world get thrown upside down? Jean grunts into his helmet, gritting his teeth and squeezing his fist around Atlas’ hand controls.

He has no control over showing Eren that night; once he’s in, Jean can’t kick him out, the feeling of Eren digging around in his memories, watching Marco be ripped from the Conn-Pod over and over again, and then seeing Jean’s bloodshot eyes and crusted nose in the hospital – it’s sickening. It sickens Jean to the very core, an invasion of privacy without compare. He feels naked before Eren, and he can’t cover himself. He feels violated.

 

* * *

 

Jean resorts to old habits. He snaps at people in the hallways, and sits alone at the canteen table, shirking even the well-meaning Connie. He gets in fights. If a tech even so much as looks at him wrong, he’ll be shoving them against the wall and spitting in their face. Sometime it goes to punches, and Jean sports blue and purple bruises along his jaw the next day. He and Eren tend to match.

They’re called on an assist for Wasp two weeks in to Jean’s transfer, and they _annihilate_ the Kaiju, a measly Category II, despite Wasp’s insistence that they stay back and hold the Miracle Mile off the coast of Busan. Their Drift doesn’t even wobble once, bubbling with an untapped anger that Jean doesn’t want to hold back this time around.

The danger, he finds, makes his Ghost Drift with Marco come back. The more he risks his life, the stronger Marco feels inside his head, scolding him for lashing out.  They can’t communicate, but Jean feels his presence there, and it’s addicting, a comfort in knowing that he’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and that his obsession will keep the cause of his death from being a total surprise. He drinks more with Eren. He stays out later in the dive bars of Tokyo, stumbling back into the Shatterdome around dawn, drunk and disorderly out of his mind. He punches more people.

Everything becomes a grey haze. He hates himself. He knows he’s wretched.

 

* * *

 

**APRIL 25, 2019. TOKYO SHATTERDOME, JAPAN.**

The first of the Mark V Jaegers is launched out of Sydney, two days before the anniversary of Howler Foxtrot’s fall. The new Jaeger is slick and sublime, a far cry for Foxtrot’s clanking bulk. Its name is Harlequin Blue, and Connie outright laughs when he hears, telling Jean with a wistful laugh that he and Sasha had a dream about piloting a Jaeger with that name.

Jean nods and mumbles around the forkful of rice he’s shovelling into his mouth. He doesn’t care to watch the screens, doesn’t care for the old ID photos of Mike and Nanaba Zacharias that they keep parading across each and every news station, definitely doesn’t care for the segment on FOX, titled _Riders on the Storm: Our Fallen Rangers_. (Because then, there’s the Marshal staring down at him, and Fightmaster Levi glaring something furious, and Mike and Nanaba again, and then both Ymir’s previous co-pilots, before Ymir and Krista themselves, followed lastly by the worst thing in the world. It’s a photo from when Marco was still a J-Tech. There’s still exuberance in his dark eyes. Jean abandons his half-eaten lunch on the table to go and throw his guts up in some crummy bathroom.)

He’s wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, tasting the acidic flavour of vomit upon his tongue – when Eren run right into him.

“Watch it,” Jean growls, shoving Eren in the shoulder. “You’d think being Drift Compatible would mean you didn’t run into me so damn often. Don’t you have any fucking spacial awareness–”

“Jean!” Eren yaps, completely oblivious. “Come quick!” His green eyes are wild as he grabs Jean by the wrist and yanks him forward, setting off into a run that has Jean tripping over his own feet.

There’s a girl in a trench coat on the airstrip he doesn’t recognise: her hair is shorter than when they last met, an angry scar cleaves her cheek in two. What he does recognise, however, is her red scarf, the colour of blood against the blue horizon.

“Mikasa,” he says, surprised, “You’re back.”

Mikasa smiles at him, thin-lipped and pretty. He’s reminded of his frustration at not being able to Drift with her, all those months ago. Things would've been so simple. 

“I’m back,” she says, soft, “Eren can’t shake me that easily, it seems.”

She’s better. Jean’s not sure what she did or how she did it, but he’s jealous. Fixing yourself shouldn’t be so easy. It’s not fair. He’s said that many times before.

“I was just in a telemeeting with Marshal Smith, from Anchorage,” she says then, looking at Jean. Her eyes are like the night sky, twinkling. Eren, beside her, is bristling with ecstatic energy. Briefly, he wonders how he ever had it in himself to hate either of them, for something that was never really their fault. They're just kids in a war that fucks with your head. “I have some good news. Your co-pilot is awake. They’re sending a chopper.”

 

* * *

 

**APRIL 27, 2019. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

Whiskey Dawn has been rebuilt. Jean hasn’t seen her since that night, not once stepping foot in the hangar between then and returning to Tokyo.

He feels her strength. There are popular theories amongst J-Techs, that when two pilots have Drifted, their connection remains after the Jaeger has been turned off – faint, sometimes only amounting to a twitch or a shudder, but something none the less. Perhaps Jean leaves a piece of himself behind each time he flies. If he’s given parts of himself to Marco, and Marco has given the same right back to him, who is to say that they haven’t both given a piece of their soul to this machine, and it’s somehow a little bit sentient.

There’s a latent connection there, Jean knows it. Whiskey shares in his fears and his doubts. He feels her heart, beating fast and frantic.

She wants to see Marco just as much as he does. And – somehow, that’s tragic. Because Jean knows this: he’s going to see Marco, and he’s going to want to quit. He doesn’t know if he can continue doing this job. He wants the war to be over. He wants a normal life. He doesn’t want a disappointing end, and because of that, he’s going to have to leave Whiskey behind. Maybe that’s today, or tomorrow, or a year down the line. But he will.

 

* * *

 

Marco is sitting up in his hospital bed when Jean appears in the doorway. His skin is brown again, blood flowing freely in his veins, and there’s a smile on his face as he chats with Sasha, who’s perched on his bed, grinning broadly.

Jean doesn’t move, content to watch for a moment. He was expecting that hedonistic need; he thought he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from throwing himself at Marco, but maybe all the nervous jiggling of his knee on the helicopter across the Pacific had gotten that out of his system.

He’s happy to just watch: Sasha cracks a joke, and Marco laughs, hiding it behind his hand. There’s a basket of fresh fruit on his bedside table, accompanied by a copy of the Iliad. Jean wonders if Sasha brought that over, or if he requested it.

He projects himself in the Ghost Drift, deliberately feeling for Marco’s consciousness. It appears before him like a light, bold and bright, at the end of a tunnel, however cliché that might sound. Jean reaches out to touch it, the light leaping at the contact, scrambling eagerly for Jean’s outstretched fingers. Jean knows he is luckier than poor Achilles: he got his Patroclus back.

Marco feels Jean there, in the Ghost Drift, before he sees him in the doorway. When his eyes meet Jean’s, he hears again the same thing he heard long ago: _oh, there you are. I’ve been looking for you,_ and then there's a sigh, as if a breath long held has finally been released. 

Marco’s expression changes, sliding from a polite grin, to a smile so sincere and _relieved_ that Jean feels tears prick in his eyes. He looks at him with love, selfish and impatient, and Jean’s soul weeps as it becomes whole once more.

Sasha slips from the room without a word, her hand ghosting across Jean’s shoulder as she passes him, and he approaches Marco’s bed, stopping just before his knees hit the mattress.

 _Hi_ , thinks Marco.

 _Hey_ , replies Jean.

Marco tries to reach up and cup Jean’s face with his hand – but there’s no arm on the end of his stump. Jean smiles sympathetically.

“I’m still getting used to it,” Marco says, with a sigh. “I can still feel it there, you know. Or maybe I can just feel you. It’s hard to tell.”

Jean cups Marco’s cheek with his own right hand, swiping his thumb across the soft skin beneath Marco’s lash line. Marco leans into the touch, greedy and _home_.

“It’s me,” Jean says, “It’s always going to be me.”

 

* * *

 

Jean pulls a chair up to Marco’s bedside, their hands entwined upon Marco’s mattress. It’s called _ghosting_ – the thing that Jaeger pilots often do after they come out the Drift, to make the acclimatisation back to normal levels of contact easier. Ymir and Krista would always tangle themselves around each other, hands in far too many places at once, groping at any patch of skin they could find; Jean and Eren would always play fight, tussling each other in the Kwoon Room, pinning each other to the floor; with Marco, it was always far quieter, the two of them slinking away to one of their rooms just to doze in each other’s company, often falling asleep with back pressed to back, and later – chest pressed to chest.

Marco’s been awake for three days. Sasha was there when he woke up, snoring loudly in a chair in the corner of his room, and he’d been so panicked, not seeing Jean there, that he’d torn some of his stitches.

She’d filled him in, once he’d come back out of surgery, and then the Marshal had arrived, and told him he was glad he was awake, and then asking him if he wanted to come back to work.

Jean grumbles at the thought, the impatience of the Marshal, but Marco smoothes his thumb over Jean’s knuckles in respite.

“I hope I can still Drift and fight,” Marco says, wistful. “I heard about Mikasa. Sometimes it’s hard to go back into the Conn-Pod after something like this.”

Jean holds his tongue. He doesn’t want to say: _what the Hell are you talking about, you’re hardly better_. He doesn’t want to say: _I’m not sure I want us to fight anymore_. He doesn’t say: _why does your idealism still_ get _me?_

He doesn’t need to say it. Marco understands implicitly.

“Do you feel guilty?” he asks, sensing Jean’s apprehension. “I look a mess, I know, but it doesn’t feel so bad. Or maybe that’s the morphine–”

Jean frowns, staring hard at their clenched hands. A storm swirls inside his head, and Marco pales, trying to probe at Jean’s mind, only to be buffeted by the winds.

“I can – I can get a prosthetic. For my arm,” he explains, “I already spoke to Professor Hanji about it – they say technology has come a long way since the Marshal, and – _Jean_.”

Jean looks up, and finds Marco’s soul bared, completely vulnerable. He sees every bruise for what it is, muddying him all purple and grey, deeper than any bones or any blood.  

“Jean,” Marco continues, “Are we still the same as we were? I know a lot of time has passed for you, so maybe – maybe you’ve moved on, but – _can you still love me this way_?”

It’s the most ridiculous question Jean has ever heard. He pulls his fingers free of Marco’s clammy palm, and tugs the itchy hospital blanket back from the bed. He kicks off his work boots, shrugs free of his coat, and climbs in next to him, shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart. He wraps his arms around Marco, and draws him against his chest, pressing a kiss into his hairline.

He finds relief he’s never felt in simple skin-to-skin contact before.

“You God-damn martyr, Marco Bodt. ‘Course I can.”

 

* * *

 

Relearning the basics is frustrating for Marco, and so it’s frustrating for Jean. The rehabilitation clinic at the hospital is good – and they’re well-equipped to deal with any amount of snark, having hosted Ymir for some months after her accident – but it’s almost patronising being told how to walk again.

He collapses, more than once, into Jean’s welcome arms, teary-eyed and angry that _he can’t do something so simple, so how will he ever get back in a Jaeger_ , but Jean sets him upright again, and they try once more, and then twice more, until Marco can walk across a room again, unaided.

Hanji has Marco fitted with a prosthetic arm, a strange, black-metal, robotic thing, and a couple green cadets in the Shatterdome mutter the word _cyborg_ in jest when they pass, and Jean almost rips their heads off.

The over-protectiveness is another issue. It manifests as little things: Jean insisting he carries Marco’s tray in the canteen, Jean snapping at people to move out of Marco’s way, Jean remarking that he doesn’t think they’re ready to jump straight in with the bō when they finally get in the Kwoon Room, despite Marco’s mobility being almost back to what it was.

“Jean!” Marco finally complains, when Jean tells him to sit down as they’re hauling punching bags out onto the mat. “I’m fine! I can do this by myself!”

“Sorry, I just–” Jean starts. “Sorry.”

Marco is beyond desperate to return to normal, to climb back into their Jaeger and fight monsters at the Breach, and Jean –

Jean can think of nothing worse.

 

* * *

 

**MAY 16, 2019. ANCHORAGE SHATTERDOME, ALASKA.**

Jean is terrified of their first real Drift, for a whole multitude of reasons that he doesn’t need to spell out. He’s tried to take it slow, to delay the inevitable, but he’s standing in his Drivesuit, unable to stop what he’s _sure_ is about to happen.

Once, his Drivesuit was a second skin, moulded to every muscle and scar inside and out. It feels clunky now, clumsy, as if he’s trying to walk in someone else’s shoes, three sizes too big. He keeps tripping over his toes.

He’s ready first, and he watches as the technicians finish suiting up Marco. They’re slower, more careful with him, and Jean can sense that Marco hates that, but holds it all in, because that's the sort of person Marco presents to the world. They haven’t had a chance to refit his prosthetic to his Drivesuit, and there’s some debate over whether to pad the armour with insulation to prevent damage to the arm, or whether that might interfere with neural relay.

 _Haven’t you lost enough_ , Jean can’t help but think. _A limb is too high a price_.

 _Some people have lost their lives_ , Marco replies. _I can afford to sacrifice a little bit more._

Jean thinks about what’s waiting for them in the depths of the Drift. It calls out to him, beckoning him with dark and twisted fingers, ushering him to _come suffer_. _You’re so good at that._

 

* * *

 

 

The baited breath on the bridge is palpable. The pressure to perform is enough to give any seasoned actor stage fright.

“Pilots on board and ready to connect,” says Sasha, “Initiating neural handshake. It’s nice to have my boys back. Let’s take this nice and easy, alright?”

Jean closes his eyes, reaching out in the Drift, waiting for the feel of Marco’s hand finding his. He knows he shakes, tremors rumbling through his body like a thunder storm, and somehow, he thinks Whiskey feels it too, the hum of her generator matching every note played out upon his ribs, as if his bones were the ivories of a piano stuck in staccato.

 _Marco_ , he calls. _I’m here_.

 _You’re shaking_ , Marco replies. _What’s wrong?_

_I’m not going to be able to block it out._

It starts as a flicker, and Jean winces away from it, physically scrunching up his eyes and turning his head to the side. In the Drift, he tries not to look, but every which way he turns, it’s there. It burns red-gold, like the harsh glare of sunlight through his eyelids. He smells saltwater first, and then burned-up metal, and he’s not sure if it’s Whiskey’s skull torn apart, or blood on his hands, seeping from beneath his suit.

_Jean–_

_Don’t look, Marco – don’t look –_

He opens his eyes – genuinely, opens his eyes, sees the Conn-Pod in real time – and still the claws of the Kaiju come, tearing into his reality with all the force of a sledgehammer. The consoles explode around him, fire and sparks, hissing and spitting; deafening waves crash against the Conn-Pod breach, each like a thunderclap, each spray of seawater razor-sharp and biting.

The blue eye of the Kaiju watches him, piercing and bloody, and then it roars, threatening to eat God himself.

_It’s not real, it’s not real – it’s in the past –_

“Pilot out of alignment,” blurts the AI.

“Both out of alignment,” says LOCCENT.

“Both of them?” Sasha demands, “Whiskey! You're out of alignment! You are both out of alignment.”

“I'm okay,” Jean croaks. He wills every ivory bone in his body to become steel, to become part of the machine, to become Whiskey, so strong and battle-ready. The harder he clenches his teeth, the fiercer he clenches his fists – he can push it back. He knows he can. _I still have more to sacrifice_ , he wills himself to believe. “Just let me control it.”

“Out of alignment,” insists the AI. “Code red.”

“You're stabilizing,” Sasha says, “But Marco is way out. He's starting to chase the RABIT!”

Jean’s head snaps around, the memory evaporating from his forecourt, replaced by manic beeping and frantic sirens, LOCCENT yapping in his ear. Marco is shivering, and the sound – the sound that’s crawling from his mouth is like a gurgling, like a drowning, and it’s _disgusting_ –

“Marco!” Jean shouts, “Marco, stay with me, Marco! Don’t get stuck in it! Marco?”

 “Something’s – something’s not right,” says LOCCENT, “Left hemisphere is out of alignment, but the right is all lit up like a Christmas tree–”

Jean stares at Marco in abstract horror, the look in Marco’s eyes something he’s seen far too many times before: pulsating with terrified energy, eyes dark and alight with the howl of the storm from that night. Lightning refracts across his face. He’s not moving, his lips a flurry over chanted words Jean cannot bear, but knows all too wretchedly well.

_Marco! Plasma caster, Marco!_

The last words he said to Marco, before he was wrenched from Whiskey’s Conn-Pod. Those words are on Marco’s lips now.

“Crap,” Sasha realises, before calling into her microphone, “Jean! Marco’s not chasing his own memory! He’s chasing yours!”

“This is just a memory, Marco,” pleads Jean. “None of this is real. Stay with me, Marco. Stay with me.”

Marco reaches out, and the plasma caster begins to power up amidst a field of electric lights. Whiskey raises her mighty arm, her entire body thrumming with rampant energy. Inside the Drift, inside the memory, Marco _is_ Jean, and he’s grasping the air and screeching, reaching for a Marco who is just – _gone_.

“Weapons system engaged. Plasma cannon powering up,” says the AI.

“Weapon system engaged! Go to fail-safe!” Sasha cries, clamour on the bridge loud in Jean’s ears. “Fail-safe not responding! There's a problem with the neural blocker! His connection's way too strong – someone get out there and disconnect them!”

Marco’s arm starts spasming, shaking like a hundred volts of electricity are surging through him, shredding him from the inside out. His breaths come hard and fast, his eyes rolling back in his head.

“Sasha!” Jean shouts, “I think he’s fitting!”

“Hold on, Jean! I’m going as fast as I can! Someone pull the powerline! The powerline! Take them offline!”

_Marco!_

Whiskey blazes blue, her plasma caster lighting up the hangar, crackling like a thunderbolt, and just as Jean’s head starts to pound, blood running rampant in his temples – she dies, in a puff of smoke.

“Weapon system disengaged,” says the AI. “Interface offline.”

Marco flops forward in his harness, hanging like a puppet on loose strings. His head lolls upon his shoulder.

“Marco!” Jean calls, struggling against his feedback cradle. Suddenly, there are technicians flooding the Conn-Pod, and he tumbles free of his harness with a gasp. Desperately, he scrambles across the cockpit on his hands and knees, catching Marco as he hits the floor from the release of his own cradle. Jean flings his own helmet off, and it bounces across the Conn – he doesn’t care. He flips up Marco’s visor, and holds him tight by the shoulders, pulling him against his chest and squishing his forehead against Marco’s.

“Neural bridge exercise ... invalid,” says the AI.

“It's okay. It's okay,” Jean says, trying desperately to smooth Marco’s hair beneath his helmet, tucking the strands of black hair around his ears. When Jean pulls his hand back, it’s smeared with orange-red blood.

“Drift sequence terminated,” says the AI. “Would you like ... to try again?”

“Turn that thing off!” Jean barks, hysterical, and it’s hard to breathe. “God-damnit, someone get medical up here! He’s _bleeding_ –” Jean starts coughing, hacking into his fist. A shower of blue droplets sprays from his lungs, splattering across his Drivesuit armour. “Sh- _shit_ – Marco – please–”

 

* * *

 

One of Marco’s ear drums has burst. The doctors say it was caused by some build-up of pressure in his inner ear that they couldn’t explain, but they say that he was lucky, and that it could’ve been worse. He’s allowed to recuperate in his own quarters, and Jean’s not sure if he’s glad of that, because at least in the hospital, Marco can’t get in any _more_ trouble.

Jean curls up against him in the narrow bed, resting his cheek on Marco’s rising chest. He can hear his heartbeat. It flutters, like a bird whose wings are clipped, but who desperately wants to fly.

“I think you’ve been inside my head too long,” Jean teases, “You’re too much like Eren in your old age. Too impulsive.”

Marco doesn’t reply, but Jean hears him sniffle, and he tenses up.

“Hell knows if they’ll let us back in the Jaeger after that,” he continues. “The Marshal is gonna be fucking fuming. He’ll ground us. We’ll be put on the back bench, maybe relegated to tech or the Academy. I don’t wanna have to deal with all those greenies. I ain’t so good with kids–”

“I want to do _more_ ,” Marco says wetly. One of his hands flops across his face, and he sniffs loudly. Jean doesn’t need to see the tears rolling down Marco’s cheeks to know they’re there. "I'm _useless_."

 _Why did it have to go this way?_  Jean thinks. Who _rolled the dice on his behalf? Who thought: you know what, I’m going to run you into the ground until you’re just a bloody smear on the asphalt._

“You’ve done enough,” Jean presses, closing his eyes tight. He wraps his fist in Marco’s shirt in the dark, his knuckles brushing against Marco’s breast. “You’ve done enough.”

 

* * *

 

**MAY 25, 2019. HONG KONG SHATTERDOME, HONG KONG.**

The PPDC cuts funding to the Anchorage Shatterdome the day after Whiskey almost blasts a hole in the hangar wall. Marco weeps, and Jean holds him through it, telling him softly, over and over, that it wasn’t his fault. It really wasn’t. It’s all this God-damn _dying_ , it’s gotten under their skin.

Whiskey Dawn is moved to Hong Kong, but Jean doesn’t really understand why: they’re a risk, and everyone knows it. He and Marco – they’re done. They haven’t said it yet, and maybe it’ll be another two, three kills before it really happens, but they’re done. They’re dead weight. They’re broken in all the ways destiny tends to break those few brave souls who try and walk through the storm unscathed. Such human arrogance deserves a divine retribution.

Sasha comes with them. For that, Jean’s glad, because Connie flies out to meet them on the airstrip, and there’s a lot of hugging and kissing and Jean even smiles. He’s also not sure what they would do without her, as much an intrinsic part of Whiskey as either he or Marco. Sometimes, he thinks a little bit of her soul is in Whiskey too, and if he is Whiskey’s head, and Marco Whiskey’s heart, Sasha is the cogs and wheels that keep them all together.

There’s no time to marvel at the Hong Kong’s iconic skyline, the drama, the charm, the magnificence of the city and its restless energy; there are briefings to be given, meetings to be had, harsh and decisive words to be said.

As they’re led through the rabbit warren of concrete tunnels of the Shatterdome, Connie and Sasha walking with clasped hands, and Marco stuck like glue to Jean’s side, pushing and pulling at Jean’s subconscious, like a cat kneading with its paws, Jean wonders this: _would it hurt to just run?_ He’s so disenchanted now, he cannot be of any use. He’s been a solider, he’s been a bitter veteran, he’s been a hero born anew; he’s saved people, and what good has it done? He’s lost just as many. He’s been pulled apart at the seams for the sake of this unwinnable war.

The Shatterdome hangar opens up like a theatre raising its curtains, suddenly the space above their heads hundreds of feet high, the smell of motor oil thick in the air. The commotion on the floor is frenzied, fork-lift trucks shaking their fists at hastily scattering techs, special ops soldiers marching in rectangular formations of black uniforms and red berets, engineers with masks drawn over their faces, blasting sheet metal with spitting blow torches.

Corinthian Wasp stands in the centre of it all, the spot-light firmly rooted on her stripes of black and yellow. Even standing still, she boasts an attitude daring Kaiju to come anywhere close. To her right, is the hulking, Herculean shadow of Helios Shrike, and beyond that, the tall and lanky Atlas Rogue. On the other side of Wasp, is Whiskey, glinting in the dim light, silent and stoic.

“Helios–” Marco starts, a mixture of confusion and awe in his voice, “And Atlas–”

“What are they doing here?” Jean finishes, looking to Connie, who just shrugs his shoulders and looks more-or-less guilty.

“Who knows,” he smarts, “Ask the Marshal. Here she comes right now.”

“Rangers,” comes a voice, and Jean’s gaze skips from Whiskey’s polished chest plate, to the friend he knows, standing before him. It’s Krista, her blonde hair pulled back into a slick bun, and her Drivesuit replaced with the starched, blue uniform of the PPDC. But on her face, distorting the ugly ripple of her burn scars, is a smile, white and gleaming. “I’m glad you could make it.”

Jean and Sasha both gawp, and Connie cackles with forgotten laughter, Krista’s smile becoming wry in a way Jean knows she adopted long ago.

“What – what’s going on here?” Jean stammers, “What are – I thought it was just Whiskey with transfer orders, because of–”

“Who cares!” Sasha gasps. She seizes Krista’s hands in both of hers, entirely inappropriately for someone of her station, and her eyes sparkle. “You’re a _Marshal_?!”

“I think the uniform looks hot,” replies another voice.

Wheels squeak on the hangar floor, and Jean turns, only to be met by a lecherous grin that he thought he might never see again. She's dressed in sweats, with a blanket draped across her lap, but she's wearing her old Johtun jacket like a cape. A part of him wants to cry. (He won’t, though. He may be in pieces, but he still has some pride. It’s _Ymir_ , after all.)

“Technically, I could get you court marshalled, Ymir,” Krista huffs, but it only makes Ymir smile wider, her eyes glinting with a life Jean has long since seen.

“Babe, no time for jokes,” Ymir says, “Don’t we have a briefing?”

“Quite,” says Krista, “I ask the others to meet us here, but–”

“Oi, Reiner!” Ymir hollers, and Jean and Marco both jump. Ymir waves her hand excitedly, and at the feet of Helios Shrike, a blond man in a flight suit, as broad as an oak, waves back. “You coming?!”

Reiner jogs over, followed in a shuffle by his co-pilot, who is tall and lanky and makes Jean vaguely uncomfortable. Reiner greets Krista with a salute, Ymir with a nod, and as his eyes roam quickly over Connie and Sasha, and Jean and Marco, he grins.

“Well, if it ain’t my Whiskey boys!” he booms, “Damn, I thought you guys would be shorter in person! Especially you, Jean, you always sound so grumpy over comms; I figured it was some sort of complex–”

Jean scowls at him, and Reiner laughs a guffawing laugh, holding his stomach as his chest heaves. From Krista’s other side, Marco notices the prowl of the Wasp pilots, Hitch and Annie, and interrupts Jean with a poke to his subconscious as all the Rangers congregate in the centre of the hangar floor.

“Ah!” Sasha exclaims, steepling her hands against her lips, “Lieutenant Leonhardt! I’m such a big fan! I have your trading card!”

 _What is this?_ Jean thinks, as Ymir cackles, and Hitch complains shamelessly that no-one ever has _her_ trading cards, and Annie maintains a stony face as she salutes Krista with a clap of her heels together.

 _I think it’s our team_ , Marco replies. Gingerly, Marco’s fingers tangle with his, and he presses his palm to Jean’s. When Jean looks up at him, Marco’s already looking down. The corner of Jean’s lips quirk up into a lop-sided smile; Marco’s eyes glimmer, and he sees within them those fields of wheat and barley.

( _Ah, right. That’s where I’m going to buy that house_ , he thinks. _Surrounded by fields of wheat. No sea for miles._ )

There’s a twinkle then, in Marco’s eyes, and he nods his head.

_Jean. Behind you._

Jean turns around, and there are the eyes of the things he needs to leave behind at last: the storm at sea, turquoise-blue and wild. It’s only been a few weeks since they saw each other last, but Eren’s hair has grown out: it’s longer, shaggier. Different. He’s different. He’s never been different before.

“Hey,” he greets, with a smile and an awkward wave, Mikasa at his side bobbing her head in a neat bow.

“Hey,” Jean replies, and then realises, “Eren, you should meet–”

“–Marco,” Eren grins, “I’m pretty sure I know him already, y’know. Your head is my head. But it’s nice to finally meet you in person, man.”

There's a moment, Jean notices, that feels like closure. Looking around at all of them - it feels like an end. Like a last stand. Looking at Eren, side-by-side with Marco - feels like a circle. He has come all the way around to zero again, but it's not the same zero. He started from zero to the right, and now at least he has come back to it, at the left. A new zero. Both a start and an end, all at once.

“It looks like everyone’s here, babe,” Ymir then smirks, wheeling herself back and forth on the spot, Connie bracing himself on the back of her chair.

“Yes,” Krista says, and when she stands up a little straighter, so does Jean, so does Marco, so does Ymir in her wheelchair – so do they all. “Rangers. I’m glad you could all make it to Hong Kong. I have a proposal for you all. I hope you're ready.”

 

* * *

 

**JUNE 16, 2019. HONG KONG SHATTERDOME, HONG KONG.**

Jean doesn’t know when the call will come, but that’s okay. A triple event, before the year is out, the four-strong team will deploy from Manila and intercept at Guam – that was Krista’s order.

No, not her order. Her battle plan. The way they are going to survive.

 _We’ll show those damn Kaijus_ , Eren had said, punching the air. _You don’t fucking mess with the human race! They can send all they’ve got, but we’ll beat them back!_

Corinthian Wasp and Helios Shrike had been deployed to the Manila Shatterdome the very next day, and Jean and Marco had seen them off from the helicopter landing pad, watching the giants disappear into the sunset, until they were just specks of black on an infinite horizon.

Atlas and Whiskey will join them when the sirens call, and Connie and Sasha will shout encouragements from the rooftops, and Ymir will snark across the comms from her new seat upon the bridge with LOCCENT. And they will try and fight.

_And they will try and win._

Jean is restless in the dark of his and Marco’s room – they’d asked for just the one, there’s no point concealing it anymore, everyone on base _knows_ – it’s too humid. The sheets stick to his sweaty skin, and even Marco is too warm, his own personal furnace, Jean hating the way he has to literally peel himself apart from Marco’s chest whenever he wants to roll over.

Marco’s prosthetic arm flops over Jean’s stomach when he fidgets – at least that feels cool.

“Why are you fretting?” Marco mumbles groggily. “Your head is so _noisy_. Go to sleep.”

“Sorry,” Jean huffs, pulling Marco’s arm around him tighter. Pons technology is useful for things other than Jaegers – electrical impulses scurry up and down Marco’s arm, and he can feel even the tiniest changes in pressure where Jean touches him. (The only real downside is that he sometimes needs an oil.)

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or do I have to go looking?” says Marco.

Jean turns over, the mattress squeaking, and wriggles up on the bed, until his nose touches Marco’s nose. A blush creeps over Marco’s cheeks even now, after all the ways they’ve touched and felt and fumbled. Jean knocks his forehead against Marco’s, letting his eyes flutter closed.

He thinks of piloting Atlas, and then of Johtun crumbling into the waves, and then of Whiskey with a hole blown in her skull. Marco echoes him right back, like a mirror, their chest rising in uniform as they breathe, together.

 _Eren_ , Jean thinks, _he manages to bring so much pain into the Drift, and yet he keeps going. Do you think we could do the same?_ _Use the hurt and the pain and the suffering to fuel us, so that we don’t have to chase it anymore._

 _We do what we have to do to keep going,_ Marco replies, nuzzling Jean tenderly on the nose with a quiet hum. _I hope we win._

Marco presses a quiet, supple kiss to Jean’s lips then, and it trembles with all the uncertainty and all the hope of a future concealed before them. Courage and fear stand side by side in a Conn-Pod somewhere, riding the waves that beat mercilessly against the chest of their Jaeger. Maybe they will die tomorrow. And maybe they won’t. That thought alone has to be enough – no talk of noble heroism or self-sacrifice, no burning desire to exterminate all the Kaiju off the face of the planet, no selfish wish for survival at any cost. The thought of living has to be enough. But at least it’s together.

 _I hope we win too,_ Jean thinks. He sleeps. He prays for an end to the darkness.

 

* * *

_This is the end, isn’t it?_  
_And you are here with me again, listening with me: the sea_  
_no longer torments me; the self_  
_I wished to be is the self I am_

– Louise Glück, _Meadowlands_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The point of this fic wasn't to be decisive. It was to establish a sense of hope and fear in constant balance; a contrast between successful and unsuccessful drops; and a focus on Jean and Marco looking towards an uncertain future far bigger than the two of them alone. But it was also a fic about bonds: the bonds of family, of friends, of husbands and wives, or colleagues, of teams. It was, of course, a fic about love. I think that's a pretty decent reason for Jean to want to keep living beyond tomorrow. 
> 
> Thanks for reading, lads. If you have something to say, please say it! Comments here can be traded for coupons (not really). My Tumblr inbox is always open if you have questions (the-prophet-lemonade). Please drop a kudos if you enjoyed!
> 
> Have a happy Christmas/holiday season of your choice. May 2017 be better than 2016. Hopefully no Kaiju apocalypse. Fingers crossed.
> 
> PS. Shameless reference to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - positive and negative zero being different mathematical points is a concept he uses as a metaphor too. That's a great book.


End file.
